Reading 16, Thanks for the Memories!, introduces the topic with a scenario of eyewitness reports as evidence and their reliability in a criminal trial. The question asked is along the lines why we believe what the eyewitnesses say. Naturally, we believe the eyewitness reports because something must have been vivid and truthful to be remembered so clearly. The book states, “memory is typically thought of as the replayingoi an event, exacdy as we saw it, like playing a video or DVD” (Hock, 2009). That is a concept that is questioned by psychologists that specialize in the study of memory. These psychologists question how much we can rely on memories. Elizabeth Loftus, a specialist in the field, found that a majority of the time the human brain recreates a situation, it is not done meticulously (Hock, 2009). What Loftus has found is called reconstructive memory. “Reconstructive memory is a result of our use of new and existing information to fill in the gaps in our recall of an experience” (Hock, 2009). Basically, our memory is subject to change due to what kind of information we obtain or situations that occur. The human brain can take something you saw in a T.V show and incorporate it into an existing memory to create …show more content…
The first experiment was questioning 150 people divided into small groups after watching a video of a car accident that was caused by someone running a red light. “For half of the participants, the first question was ‘How fast was Car A [the car that ran the stop sign] going when it ran the stop sign?’ For the other half of the participants, the question was ‘How fast was Car A going when it turned right?’”(Hock, 2009). Both groups had the same last question and it asked if they had seen a stop sign for car A. 53% of those who were asked the question that had “stop sign” in it said that they had seen the sign and only 35% of those in the other group said that they also saw the stop sign (Hock,