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. 2008 May;16(4):410-9.
doi: 10.1080/09658210801956922.

Psychotropic placebos reduce the misinformation effect by increasing monitoring at test

Sophie Parker  1 , Maryanne Garry, Randall W Engle, David N Harper, Seema L Clifasefi
Affiliations

Psychotropic placebos reduce the misinformation effect by increasing monitoring at test

Sophie Parker et al. Memory. 2008 May.

Abstract

A psychotropic placebo can help people resist the misinformation effect, an effect thought to be caused by a shift to more stringent source monitoring. When this shift occurs has been unclear. To address this issue we gave some people - but not others - a phoney cognitive-enhancing drug we called R273. Shortly afterwards, everyone took part in a misinformation effect experiment. To gather evidence about source monitoring we surreptitiously recorded time to read the misleading postevent narrative, and response time at test. Our findings suggest that people shifted to more stringent source monitoring at test. Moreover, people with higher working memory capacity (WMC) performed better than people with lower WMC - but only when they were told they had received R273, a finding that fits with research showing that WMC can confer advantages in situations demanding effortful control, but not when automatic heuristics suffice.

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