...Elizabeth Loftus: Biography and False Memoires Psy/310 When looking at the field of psychology, we will learn about males who have contributed to the growth of psychology. Some examples of men we study in beginners psychology are E.G Boring, Robert I. Watson and of course Sigmund Freud. There is little mention of females who have contributed to psychology. Why is it that females are not really mentioned in the history of psychology? Females have contributed to the growth of psychology just as men have. A woman that has spent her whole life trying to understand memory is Elizabeth Loftus. We will begin with a short biography and also touch on how she has helped psychology to grow. Elizabeth Loftus was born Elizabeth Fishman on October 16, 1944 to Sidney and Rebecca Fishman in Los Angeles, California (Born, 1997). She was raised in Bel Air with both her parents. Then in 1959 her mother passed away, she had drowned in a swimming pool when Loftus was only 14 years old. Loftus wanted to be a high school math teacher, but after attending a psychology class at UCLA she changed her mind. She continued in school to receive her Bachelors in 1966 in math and psychology. She met Geoffrey Loftus in 1968 while attending graduate school at Stanford, and married him. While attending Stanford she was introduced to the study of long term memory and was very interested in this subject. Loftus got her Masters in 1967. She continued her education at Stanford and got her Ph...
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...In chapter eight of Opening Skinner's Box, Lauren Slater introduced us to who she referred to as one of the field's most innovative female experimental psychologists, Elizabeth Loftus (pg 181). Elizabeth Loftus was a psychologist who believed memory is not as reliable as many may be certain of. Loftus idea of memory was that it is as slippery as a stream and as unreliable as a rat (Slater 181). I too agree with Loftus, I think that memory is actually very unreliable. I tend to personally second guess myself with many things that I do. One of my two jobs is working at a hair salon where I am left alone to close constantly. Many times I have been in my car buckled up and ready to leave when I ask myself, "Did I lock the door, I locked it right?"...
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...Cognitive psychology contacts with mental processes such as memory, researches have indicated that his particular cognitive process is not an exact replica of experiences, but is reconstructive. In light of this new research, experiments have tested and shown that memory may be influenced by certain units of knowledge that we have about frequently encountered people, objects or situations called “schemas.” The Schema Theory suggest that all new information interlinks withhold information represented in a schema and can influence memory. Bartlett Developed the Schema theory, which eventually became crucial in understanding how reconstructive memory works and the reliability of eyewitness testimony. He suggested that how a person remembers an event is subject to change depending on the person's cultural background and what values they were taught. Therefore, when a person remembers an event, any missing piece of information regarding that event is filled up based on their schema. He tested this in his famous „War of The Ghosts‟ experiment. This was supported by Allport and Postman, in 1947, which aimed to test the reliability of memory and the effect a person's schema has on their interpretation of an event. Loftus and Palmer Tested their hypothesis that language can alter reconstructive memory in an eyewitness testimony. Their aim was to show that leading questions can alter memory depending on its phrasing. Loftus and Palmer formed an opportunity sample consisting of 45 American...
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...In Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box, the chapter of "Lost in the Mall" introduces a woman named Elizabeth Loftus, who believes memory is unreliable. I disagree the way Loftus tries to prove this belief through the way she tells sexually abused survivors what happened to them, didn't necessarily actually happened, I believe she has no right to say that in such a manner. An example that I disagree that Loftus should bluntly tell these survivors is through the instance that she doesn't necessarily consider their perspectives on the matter. Slater writes what Loftus says, "'Totally forgetting that you witnessed something that traumatic, and then suddenly recalling it whole decades after the fact? Burying every detail and then having it float...
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...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...
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...information are when questions are used to give a false memory to a person giving an EWT * There are two types of misleading information; leading questions are questions that make it likely that a pp schema would influence their answer and post-event information is misleading information added to a question after the incident occurred * Elizabeth Loftus has been particularly interested in the effects in memory provided after the event and her colleagues have carried out many studies which shows that memory for events can be changed or supplemented y providing misleading information later STUDY 1: * Loftus (1975) 150 pps were shown a film of a car accident. After they had seen the film pps were divided into 2 groups and each group were asked 10 questions about what they had seen * Group 1 were asked questions that were related to the original film e.g. How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the ‘Stop’ sign? * Group 2 were asked same questions except one, ‘How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn when travelling along the country road?- no barn deliberately misleading * After one week the pps were all asked a further 10 questions and both groups were asked: ‘Did you see a barn?’ and Loftus found that 2.7% of the pps in group 1 gave incorrect answers, answering ‘yes’ to the question about the barn whereas 17.3% of the pps in group 2 answered ‘yes’. * Loftus concluded that those who were told misleading information...
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...witness of a crime and studying this unit, there is one trick for giving your memory a boost, Is to use mnemonic devices to encode items a special way. Three popular techniques is the Method of loci, peg words, and acronyms. There are other reasons for memory distortions, for instance epinephrine and cortisol are natural hormones in the body that affect the amygdale. The powerful effect of these hormones produce what is known as “flashbulb memories”, flashbulb memories are memories that are produced with surprising or emotional events in life. Another reason that could affect memory is the sleeper effect. The sleeper effect is like when students cram for a final the day before. Trying to memorize a lot of information at the same time really doesn’t help your memory it actually impedes it. You wouldn’t learn or remember as much unless you did a distributed practice which is spacing out you learning, you tend to retain more information a little bit at a time instead of trying to remember all at once. [4] If, I was a juror and I knew about this information then I would definite bring it to light, the fact that we create our own memories to make life more efficient. There are numerous ways that people forgot information without even realizing it. Elizabeth Loftus did studies on manufacturing memories to bring this topic to light because a lot of people were serving time in prison because of these types of memories. She did a study about people visiting Disney World and asks about what...
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...Eyewitness testimony is a legal term. It is the detailed account given by a witness in a courtroom, describing what they perceived happened during the specific incident under investigation. This is used as evidence to show what happened from a witness’s point of view. Eyewitness testimony is a crucial area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory; studies into eyewitness testimony have found that it can be affected by many factors. Elizabeth Loftus, a leading researcher in eyewitness testimony, conducted studies to demonstrate that memory is not a factual recording of an event and that memories can become distorted by other information which occurs after the event. Loftus and Palmer (1974) study consisted of two laboratory experiments; both were examples of an independent measures design. The independent variable in both of the experiments is the verb used. The dependent variable in the first experiment is the participant’s speed estimate and the dependent variable in the second experiment is whether the participant believed they saw glass. In the first experiment 45 students from the University of Washington were shown video clips, short excerpts from safety films made for driver education, which were 5 to 30 seconds long. They were split into 5 groups, with 9 participants in each group. After each clip the students were asked to write a report of the accident they had just seen. They were also asked to answer some specific questions but the crucial question...
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...told how unreliable our senses and memory are. These ways of knowing function simultaneously so people may gain their own knowledge and store that information throughout their lives. Sense perception is defined as the way our bodies perceive and gain knowledge from an external stimuli. Memory is essential in retaining the knowledge gained through our senses. Despite this, studies by psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer suggest how easy it is to manipulate memories of an individual by simply proposing the idea that false events occurred. While the way people interpret their environment can easily be distorted, as shown with fallacies in sense perception and memory, these two ways of knowing are valuable,...
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...The Process of Inducing False Memories in a Subject. The history of false memories has been clarified, but now it is time to be enlightened on how inducing false memories work. The process of inducing a false memory in a person is not complex as previously demonstrated by history itself. There are a couple of examples of un-trained people “treating” other people and inducing memories by accident. As a matter of fact there are case in which formally trained modern clinical psychologist have been treating people and have induced false memories by accident. So, in order to induce a false memory it may be easier than you think. The hallmark of most false memories that have occurred in most documented case, is that they are dramatic in nature....
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...To find out ‘how accurately people can remember the details of a complex event.’ Abstract: This study is a replication of Loftus and Palmer (1974) original study on how a different verb in the question used to ask for the speed of the car affected the participants’ estimate on the speeds of the car crash. In this experiment, three videos were shown to them and they were asked a series of questions including how fast the car was when it smashed/contacted each other. The participants are teenage students from an international school in Hong Kong. It is hypothesized that the word ‘smash’ would cause a higher estimate in speed than the word ‘contacted’. Speed estimates for ‘smashed’ were in fact slower overall than ‘contacted’, a discussion on why the results were not replicated is included. The results from this experiment did not conform with the original study so they are inconclusive. (136) Contents: Introduction 1 Design 1 Participants 1 Procedure 2 Results and Conclusion 2 Discussion 3 References 4 Appendix 1 4 Appendix 2 6 Appendix 3 7 Appendix 4 8 Introduction: Loftus and Palmer (1974) believed that our memory depended on the reconstruction of an event in our mind when we try to remember. So they created an experiment where participants were asked to view videos of car crashes and recall the speed they think the cars were traveling at time of collision. The aim was to find out how accurately people can remember the details...
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... Estimator variables occur at the crime scene while the eyewitness is encoding the event into their memory; these are not controlled by the criminal justice system (Leach, Cutler, & Van Wallendael,...
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...The Cognitive interview Fisher and Geiselman came up with the cognitive interview in 1992. The cognitive interview is based on proven psychological principles concerning effective memory recall. It is a procedure designed for use in police interviews that involve witnesses. It is a way of interviewing eyewitnesses to improve the accuracy and detail of their memory of the crime. There were two main aims in developing the cognitive interview. The first one was to improve the effectiveness of the police interviews when questioning witnesses. The second was to involve psychological research to the interviews, particularly the work of Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus believed that eyewitness memory operates like a video camera. Fisher and Geiselman found that people remember events better when they are provided with retrieval cues. This is done by mentally reinstating the context of the event being recalled. It is an attempt to maximise the range of retrieval cues. The cognitive interview can be characterised into 4 components. These are: Report everything- The interviewer encourages the witness to report every single detail of the event that they can remember, even if it is irrelevant. This means letting the witness speak and not get interrupted as this may break the retrieval cue. This means the interviews can sometimes take a very long time and can be unsuccessful. Mental reinstatement of original content- This is where the interviewer asks the witness to mentally recreate...
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...it(___storage__). To most people, memory is __recall__, the ability to retrieve information not in conscious awareness. To a psychologist, memory is any sign that something learned has been retained. So __recognizing__ or more quickly releasing information also indicates memory. A. Retrieval Cues The process of retrieving a memory follows a similar principle because memories are held in storage by a web of associations, each piece of information interconnected with others. When you encode information such as your surroundings, moods, and seating position, you can trigger your __retrieval cues__. B. Mnemonic Devices Mnemonic devices are a way to encode information into your memory. The association we have with these ways of remembrance help us create associations to to our goal. For example, ROY G.BIV, serves as a mnemonic for learning the light spectrum. C. Priming I. Philosopher-psychologist __William James__ referred to the process of the activation of unconsciously creating particular associations with events as __priming__. The priming effect occurs when people respond faster or more efficiently to an event if a similar event precedes it. II. The context of these memory encoding stimuli and processes can be seen as another type of memory retrieval:__deja vu__ , or being in a context similar to one we’ve been in before that may trigger our previous memories of the event. Memory and Memories: Associated...
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...eyewitness testimony which makes it extremely important to get truthful and corroborated evidence. It is very easy for an interviewer to put false information into the minds of the interviewees which could in fact incarcerate the wrong person. Receiving eyewitness testimony must be done in a proper way to ensure the information of a particular event is correct. Proper Questions Interviewers must ask questions in a proper manner to ensure there are no bias answers. If questions are asked incorrectly, a person may give perceive changed memories....
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