The effect of “ground” on “figure”: the impact of context reinstatement and context integration on eyewitness testimonies

Eich (1985) found that participants' recall benefited especially from context reinstatement when they integrated the target with the contextual features in their environment (i.e., context integration). We explored the relationship between these two contextual manipulations in an eyewitness situation. All participants (N = 160) viewed a video of a staged theft and were asked to identify the culprit and recall the event after a one-week delay. Results suggested that context reinstatement (but not context integration) enhanced the perceived familiarity of the target/foil and their willingness to identify someone in the lineup. Although context reinstatement improved facial identification when the target was present, it also artificially boosted participants’ confidence. In terms of recall, reinstating the study context improved participants’ free recall of both central and peripheral details and cued recall of peripheral details. The results were consistent with the (mis)attribution of familiarity and the outshining hypothesis.