A verbal recognition test was given 5 min. Twelve were filler questions and 6 were critical questions. More people said yes to central critical questions than to peripheral critical questions. More people said yes to these items in the 1 week retention interval condition. When the retention interval was long, people tended to falsely recognize central actions more than peripheral actions.
People tend to falsely recognize central script actions more than peripheral script actions.
Longer retention intervals lead to a tendency to fill in missing information with scripts. Script centrality and exposure rate had no interaction. Either the crime was unexpected or few people had experienced a similar scenario, so during encoding, they may not have adequately activated the robbery script. The script may have been activated further into the slide show. Slides are not as realistic as an actual scene of film.