Eyewitnesses under influence: How feedback affects the realism in confidence judgements

This study investigated the effect of two types of feedback (confirmatory and disconfirmatory) on the accuracy in witnesses' confidence judgements of their event memory. Overall, the witnesses evidenced overconfidence both when they received feedback and in the Control condition (no feedback). The results showed that confirmatory feedback caused higher overconfidence, compared both with when receiving disconfirmatory and no feedback. These results suggest that the impact of feedback on the accuracy of confidence judgements show the same pattern of results for event memory as for line-up identification tasks. Finally, when the witnesses rated the total number of questions that they had answered correctly they gave fairly correct estimates compared with their actual number of correct answers.