Judit Lőcsei-Campbell contacted Cara to let us know her students  spotted a discrepancy between the current (third) edition of The Complete Companion student book (AQA A) and the previous (second) edition.

While the second edition says (on page 35) that Yarmey (1993) found no significant differences in the accuracy of recall that could be attributed to the age group of the witnesses, we have changed that for the third edition where the text reads (also page 35): ‘There were significant differences in the accuracy of recall also – the oldest group was inferior to the other two groups in terms of accuracy of recall.’

So what happened? The error in the second edition came from the abstract to the original article, which you can read here. It was only when our authors rechecked  the original article itself that they discovered the error, which is why we have made that correction for the third edition.

As Cara says, ‘getting research right is not always easy as there are many Chinese whispers – Mike and I try as far as possible to consult original papers’.

Thanks very much to Judit and her students for giving us this opportunity to explain the reason for this change.