(Un)Intentional Lying: The role of the cognitive load on memory

The doctoral project aims to assess eyewitness memory reports for a crime. In particular, I will examine the reliability of eyewitness memories when they honestly remember a crime and after having lied about it. The research will be carried out through experimental studies. The first two studies have the aim to assess the role of individual cognitive resources and of the manipulation of cognitive load on the accuracy of memories when individuals honestly remember the event. The other studies will focus on the effect of lying on eyewitness’ memory. It will be investigated how having lied, such as false denials, feigning amnesia and fabrication about the crime, may affect subsequent recall of the actual event. One study will investigate how having repeatedly lied on a crime will impact the actual memory. A second study will examine the effects on the original memory of different types of false denials requiring high and low cognitive load during the lie. A third experiment will be conducted to investigate whether liars are able to correctly recognize the details that they have previously fabricated from what they actually have seen and whether fabricators believe in their answers.