Individual Listing

3111E PSYCHOLOGY BUILDING
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Clark, Steven

Professor of Psychology

College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Psychology


Biography

My research is directed at several questions about memory. The research is guided by (although not tied to) formal mathematical models. These models provide a framework within which mental processes and their implications (i.e., predictions) can be clearly specified. My research addresses the following issues: 1. Relationship between recall and recognition, 2. Effects of similarity in recognition, 3. Confidence and accuracy, 4. Social group processes in retrieval; All of which have important implications for 5. Eyewitness testimony. The relationship between recall and recognition poses an old, but still unanswered question. We know that recall and recognition operate by different processes, and yet recent research (some of which was done in my lab: Clark, 1992; Clark, Hori, & Callan, 1993) indicates that there is also overlap in the mental components which serve recall and recognition. This leaves us to work out the details of just which processes are unique and which are common and how do they work together in recall and recognition. Current research in my lab is examining the effects of similarity in recognition memory. Some of the results are quite surprising: Under some conditions target-distractor similarity facilitates recognition performance, whereas under other conditions this similarity leads to a decrease in accuracy. Similarity not only produces interesting effects on recognition accuracy, but also affects the confidence people have in their recognition decisions. Moreover, the similarity relations which decrease recognition accuracy function to increase recognition confidence. That is, people become more confident about recognition judgments which are wrong. We are currently modeling this confidence-accuracy dissociation. Another current research project examines how people work together collaboratively to remember events. For example, two college roommates may get together ten years after graduation and try to remember the names of their professors. Will they work better as a team than they would if they worked independently? And how will they work together? Curiously, much of the current research suggests that people are not very good at working together on memory retrieval tasks. All of these research projects address basic issues about memory, and they all have important implications for how jurors evaluate eyewitness testimony. The relationship between recall and recognition is important because people initially recall events when talking to the police, but later are asked to recognize a suspect in a police line-up. Similarity effects are important because police line-ups are typically constructed so that the non-suspects in the line-up look similar to the suspect. The relationship between confidence and accuracy is of central importance in understanding eyewitness testimony. The U.S. Supreme Court (Neil v. Biggers, 1972) has stated that the confidence of a witness should be an important consideration in evaluating the reliability of that witness's testimony. However, 20 years of research shows that confidence does not predict accuracy. In my research I work to blend laboratory research and rigorous, formal modeling techniques with data from real criminal cases to better understand the basic mechanisms of memory.

Degrees

BA Psychology 1981

Illinois State University

PhD Cognitive Psychology 1988

Indiana University, Bloomington