How accurate are our memories?
Our memories often feel like records of the past. But the dominant view among scientists is that our personal memories are highly prone to error and not to be trusted. How accurate is memory, really? No need to be pessimistic – our study suggests that memory, while not a perfect record, is much more accurate than scientists think.
Is it possible to prove false memories?
When Loftus gets involved in court cases, she tries to find out what outside influences might be responsible for false memories. While there’s no ironclad way to declare that some piece of a person’s memory is inaccurate, there are a few circumstances under which recollections are more trustworthy, she says.
Why are our memories inaccurate?
Our brains constantly rewrite our memories, inserting useful, current information. This is actually a survival mechanism. In a way, you could say the concept of memory rewriting is the overarching reason our memories are inaccurate.
Is memory reliable or unreliable?
But neuroscientists have shown that each time we remember something, we are reconstructing the event, reassembling it from traces throughout the brain. Psychologists have pointed out that we also suppress memories that are painful or damaging to self-esteem . We could say that, as a result, memory is unreliable.
Who tested the accuracy of flashbulb memories?
Why do memories fail?
What are the effects of schemas on creativity?
How does schema help us remember?
How can information processing be biased?
Why is list B more likely?
What is cognitive bias?
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About this website
What does Elizabeth Loftus say about memory?
“If you are being urged to remember more,” Loftus said at the trial, “you may produce, you know, something like a guess or a thought, and that then can start to feel like it's a memory.”
Who gave the concept of false memory?
In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted a study to investigate the effects of language on the development of false memory. The experiment involved two separate studies.
What did Elizabeth Loftus believe?
Loftus believed that eyewitness testimony by itself should not be enough to convict a person. Although these studies focused on automobile accidents, the results were applicable to a broad range of complex events.
What is Loftus theory?
LOFTUS: When you feed people misinformation about some experience that they may have had, you can distort or contaminate or change their memory. Misinformation is everywhere. We get misinformation not only if we're questioned in a leading way.
What did Freud say about false memories?
Freud subsequently repudiated the notion that these events had literally occurred. He eventually concluded that the reported “seduction” was the manifestation of imagination and fantasy related to latent infantile sexuality rather than the repressed memory of an actual event.
How did Loftus interpret false memories?
Answer and Explanation: The correct solution to this problem is provided C: we accept subsequent misinformation as being correct, and this information becomes part of our memory for the original event.
What theory did Loftus and Palmer use?
Loftus and Palmer (1974) Study. Aim: To test their hypothesis that the language used in eyewitness testimony can alter memory.
What is the Loftus and Palmer study?
Loftus and Palmer aimed to show that leading questions could distort EWT accounts via the cues provided in the question. To test this hypothesis, Loftus and Palmer asked people to estimate the speed of motor vehicles using different forms of questions after they had observed a car accident.
What did George Miller do for psychology?
George A. Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, was a pioneer who recognized that the human mind can be understood using an information-processing model. His insights helped move psychological research beyond behaviorist methods that dominated the field through the 1950s.
What was Wilhelm Wundt's theory?
Wundt believed in reductionism. That is, he believed consciousness could be broken down (or reduced) to its basic elements without sacrificing any of the properties of the whole. Wundt argued that conscious mental states could be scientifically studied using introspection.
What is Elizabeth Loftus best known for?
Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, is one of the nation's leading experts on memory. Her experiments reveal how memories can be changed by things that we are told. Facts, ideas, suggestions and other post-event information can modify our memories.
Who is Loftus in psychology?
Elizabeth Loftus has appeared on countless talk shows including the Oprah Whinfrey Show. She has published 19 books and nearly 200 articles. She remains one of the most sought after psychology speakers and is an important spokesperson for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF).
What is false memory in psychology?
False memory refers to cases in which people remember events differently from the way they happened or, in the most dramatic case, remember events that never happened at all. False memories can be very vivid and held with high confidence, and it can be difficult to convince someone that the memory in question is wrong.
What is a false memory called?
false memory syndrome, also called recovered memory, pseudomemory, and memory distortion, the experience, usually in the context of adult psychotherapy, of seeming to remember events that never actually occurred.
What is the word for false memory?
Also called illusory memory; paramnesia; pseudomemory.
Why do we create false memories?
Factors that can influence false memory include misinformation and misattribution of the original source of the information. Existing knowledge and other memories can also interfere with the formation of a new memory, causing the recollection of an event to be mistaken or entirely false.
10 Ways Your Memory Is Completely Inaccurate | HowStuffWorks
The memory is burned into your mind. It was your birthday. You turned 7. You were wearing your favorite pink dress. Your sister bumped into you, chocolate ice cream cone in hand.
What’s Wrong with Inaccurate Memory? | Psychology Today
One way to answer that question is to specify exactly how memory is wrong, developing a taxonomy of memory’s mistakes. In one study of mine, participants were required to 1) describe a personal ...
The Surprising Accuracy of Memory | Discover Magazine
The Surprising Accuracy of Memory Our memories are more reliable than experts predicted
How accurate is your memory? - Medical Xpress
New research into the human memory has found that it is possible to plant false memories in the human mind that can have significant long-term effects on behaviour.
Try it yourself
Take a look at the three lists above, and read each word for about a second.
False recognition and the DRM paradigm
This experiment comes from a classic 1995 study by Henry L. Roediger and Kathleen McDermott at Rice University in Texas. Based on earlier work by James Deese (hence the name Deese-Roediger-McDermott, or DRM, paradigm), participants heard a series of word lists, which they then had to recall from memory.
How can false memories be implanted into someone's mind?
Many researchers have conducted studies showing false memories can be implanted into someone's mind by asking suggestive, leading questions. For example, "You're depressed but don't know why. Do you remember your father ever touching you inappropriately as a child?" Hypnosis, guided imagery, dream interpretation and feeding a subject misinformation after an event can also implant a false memory into someone's mind [sources: Hayasaki, Vitelli ].
What can implant false memories in a person's mind?
Hypnosis, guided imagery and dream interpretation can all implant false memories in a person's mind.
How does repeated exposure create false memories?
The theory of repeated exposure creating false memories is linked with suggestibility and implanted memories. As you read earlier, if someone asks you leading questions, you might "remember" an event that never occurred. Similarly, if someone tells you President Obama is a Muslim, and you're a conservative who doesn't care for him, you may falsely remember reading an article about the president attending services in a mosque. Repeated exposure takes these concepts a step further, saying that the more times you're fed misinformation or leading questions, the more likely you are to swear a particular memory is true.
Why do we have different stories?
That's why several eyewitnesses to the same event often report different stories. You may see a two-car collision and recall how the blue car broadsided the red car after blowing through a stop sign, because that once happened to you, while someone else may emphasize the fact that the driver of the red car was yakking on her phone, because that's a pet peeve of hers. One memory researcher explained it this way: We all have personal narratives that are formed by our beliefs and values. Our minds take our memories and create explanations for what we've seen or heard based on those beliefs and values [source: Hayasaki ].
What are the factors that affect how well you remember?
A wide variety of factors can influence how well you remember, or don't remember, certain events. These are called memory biases . Memory biases can also affect how quickly you're able to recall something, while certain types of biases may actually alter some of your memories.
Why does humor stick in our memory?
Humor. If something strikes us as funny, it's more likely to stick in our memory. The reason why isn't known, although some posit it's because humor is an emotional response, and emotions are more easily recalled. Or it could be that our brains work a little longer to process humor, thus giving the event more time to be laid down as a memory.
Is it true that no one laughed at all?
Either scenario may be true, or neither. No one may have been laughing at all. But you were embarrassed, and stored the memory of your friends laughing at you. Or perhaps your brain inserted that detail later, because the one fact it remembered was your humiliation.
How many false confessions are reversed?
According to a recent article in The New York Times, “False confessions have figured in 24 percent of the approximately 289 convictions reversed by DNA evidence.” (See, “Why Do Innocent People Confess?”)
Why do people make false confessions?
False confessions can be motivated by a desire to avoid painful interrogations, to curry favor with jailors, or the false hope of getting the nightmare over with. But, then, all memories are motivated. It is just a matter of degree.
Why is it important to keep objective records?
It makes sense to keep objective records of our decisions and our acts. (If we use our computers for that, we can usually count on their invariant memories.) But we usually feel it is too much trouble to record so much information, and we avoid the task.
Which type of memory preserves information according to the acoustic properties of the stimulus?
c. Sensory memory preserves information according to the acoustic properties of the stimulus.
How long can information be stored in sensory memory?
a. Information can be stored in sensory memory for only a fraction of a second.
How long can a STM keep unrehearsed information?
b. STM can maintain unrehearsed information for about 20 seconds.
What words did Kiana recall?
11.Kiana was given a list of words as part of a memory test that included: "dog, pail, and hate." Later,she' recalled these words as: "dig, paint, and hard." Kiana's errors in recall suggest that she had encoded the original word list
What are the features of LTM?
30. One of the notable features of LTM is that it is organized according to a clustering principle, which means
What happens if Mark doesn't write down the items he hears?
22. Mark is listening as his roommate lists 14 things that they need to buy for their apartment before the end of the week. Based on George Miller's research into the capacity of short-term memory, if Mark doesn't write the items down as he hears them, he is most likely to remember
What is a memory code that emphasizes the physical structure of the stimulus called?
8. A memory code that emphasizes the physical structure of the stimulus is called a (n) code.
Is memory accurate?
Our memories often feel like records of the past. But the dominant view among scientists is that our personal memories are highly prone to error and not to be trusted. How accurate is memory, really? No need to be pessimistic – our study suggests that memory, while not a perfect record, is much more accurate than scientists think.
Do we remember the past?
On the one hand, we implicitly believe that our own memories correspond to the reality of the past, and this belief is core to our very sense of self. Our shared belief in the accuracy of each others’ memories grounds our collective social fabric and affects the outcomes of our justice system. On the other hand, we all know that memory is not a perfect record of the past – remembering is reconstructive process. Most obviously, we forget. Memories that are at first vivid inevitably fade or disappear altogether. And more dramatically, we sometimes remember incorrectly, warping or augmenting the details of past events.
What does Loftus try to find out about false memories?
When Loftus gets involved in court cases, she tries to find out what outside influences might be responsible for false memories. While there’s no ironclad way to declare that some piece of a person’s memory is inaccurate, there are a few circumstances under which recollections are more trustworthy, she says.
How can witnesses corrupt their memories?
Witnesses can absorb new information that contaminates their memories by talking to each other or seeing media coverage of the crime as well. Sometimes, a person can even unwittingly corrupt their own memories by speculating about how the event might have transpired. Loftus has spoken to people who witnessed car wrecks and were certain about which direction both vehicles were traveling when the accident happened. But investigators discovered that based on the routes both drivers were taking, the witness’s version of events was impossible. It could be that the witness made assumptions based on where the cars came to rest after colliding, she says. “Your own thoughts can act like external information and you can distort your own memory that way.”
What did Loftus say to a witness?
Loftus once consulted on a case where a recording featured a police officer trying to prompt a witness to identify the suspect in a set of photos. The witness said they did not recognize any of the pictures, but the interviewer was not satisfied. “The officer said, ‘I see your eyes drifting down to number six, what’s going on?’” Loftus says. “It was one of the more highly suggestive things I’ve ever seen in an actual interview.”
How to avoid contaminating a witness's memories?
One way to avoid contaminating a witness’s memories is for police to send someone unfamiliar with the suspect to run lineups or photo identifications. “A person who does not know who the suspect is cannot inadvertently cue the witness,” Loftus says.
Why is it important to remember events?
Loftus recommends writing down everything you remember before you share it with anyone else, and before anyone else can give you more information about what happened.
What is the problem with Fisher's open ended questions?
“Your responses to open-ended questions tend to be much more accurate than responses to very closed questions, as in, ‘what color eyes does he have?’”
Who developed the cognitive interview?
There are many ways that our recollections can be distorted. That’s why Ronald Fisher, a psychologist at Florida International University in Miami, developed the cognitive interview. “If the interview is done properly, witness descriptions are generally pretty accurate,” he says.
Why is it important to have a memory test?
Some elements include the following: First, and most important of all, because the test itself contaminates memory, only the initial memory test provides uncontaminated results. Subsequent memory tests, including the dramatic one that occurs in court in front of the jury, constitute contaminated evidence.
What facts gave rise to the belief that Leiterman may have been wrongfully convicted based on contaminated evidence?
Even though no connection between Leiterman and Ruelas was ever established, the prosecution theorized that all three must have been together after midnight at the murder scene in 1969, with the preschooler bleeding on the victim for some unknown reason while Leiterman killed her . According to the same theory, 33 years later, in 2002, in an almost inconceivable coincidence, evidence samples from Mixer, Ruelas and Leiterman just happened to be together again in the Michigan State Police Laboratory. The murder victim’s cold case evidence was there because the case had recently been reopened; the 1969 preschooler’s DNA sample was there as part of an active murder investigation, and Leiterman’s DNA sample was there because he had recently been arrested for forging a prescription. The nearly simultaneous analyses of evidence from these three cases in the same crime lab in 2002—a reunion, of sorts, among Mixer, Ruelas and Leiterman, who were ostensibly last together on the night of the murder in 1969—was either an incredible coincidence or the Mixer evidence was contaminated with DNA from both Leiterman and Ruelas.
Why is it important to assess confidence?
Assessing confidence is critical because it provides direct information about the trustworthiness of the uncontaminated ID.
What does it mean when an eyewitness says "low confidence"?
An initial eyewitness identification made with low confidence indicates that even though memory was not contaminated, the ID is untrustworthy (that is, by indicating low confidence, the eyewitness is effectively saying, “There’s a good chance that I’m making an error”).
What does malleability mean in memory?
What it means is that the malleability of memory can harm reliability. Once this fact is appreciated, then proper testing protocols can be put in place to minimize the likelihood that the original memory trace is contaminated.
Is DNA testing reliable?
Instead of concluding that DNA evidence is inherently unreliable because of the contamination that apparently occurred in this case, a more reasonable conclusion would be that for DNA testing to be reliable, proper protocols must be followed. Few would doubt that under such conditions, DNA evidence is highly reliable.
Can eyewitness misidentifications be overturned?
The answer seems like a resounding “yes” if you consider some well-known and rather disconcerting information. Eyewitness misidentifications are known to have played a role in 70 percent of the 349 wrongful convictions that have been overturned based on DNA evidence (so far). Psychologists have learned a lot about why such errors happen.
Who tested the accuracy of flashbulb memories?
Talarico and Rubin (2003) tested the accuracy of flashbulb memories by asking students to write down their memory of how they had heard the news about either the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or about an everyday event that had occurred to them during the same time frame.
Why do memories fail?
They fail in part due to our inadequate encoding and storage, and in part due to our inability to accurately retrieve stored information. But memory is also influenced by the setting in which it occurs, by the events that occur to us after we have experienced an event, ...
What are the effects of schemas on creativity?
When schemas prevent us from seeing and using information in new and nontraditional ways. Creativity may be impaired by the overuse of traditional, expectancy-based thinking. Misinformation effect.
How does schema help us remember?
We have seen that schemas help us remember information by organizing material into coherent representations. However, although schemas can improve our memories, they may also lead to cognitive biases. Using schemas may lead us to falsely remember things that never happened to us and to distort or misremember things that did. For one, schemas lead to the confirmation bias, which is the tendency to verify and confirm our existing memories rather than to challenge and disconfirm them. The confirmation bias occurs because once we have schemas, they influence how we seek out and interpret new information. The confirmation bias leads us to remember information that fits our schemas better than we remember information that disconfirms them (Stangor & McMillan, 1992), a process that makes our stereotypes very difficult to change. And we ask questions in ways that confirm our schemas (Trope & Thompson, 1997). If we think that a person is an extrovert, we might ask her about ways that she likes to have fun, thereby making it more likely that we will confirm our beliefs. In short, once we begin to believe in something—for instance, a stereotype about a group of people—it becomes very difficult to later convince us that these beliefs are not true; the beliefs become self-confirming.
How can information processing be biased?
Another way that our information processing may be biased occurs when we use heuristics, which are information-processing strategies that are useful in many cases but may lead to errors when misapplied. Let’s consider two of the most frequently applied (and misapplied) heuristics: the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic.
Why is list B more likely?
Most people think that list B is more likely, probably because list B looks more random, and thus matches (is “representative of”) our ideas about randomness. But statisticians know that any pattern of four girls and four boys is mathematically equally likely. The problem is that we have a schema of what randomness should be like, which doesn’t always match what is mathematically the case. Similarly, people who see a flipped coin come up “heads” five times in a row will frequently predict, and perhaps even wager money, that “tails” will be next. This behavior is known as the gambler’s fallacy. But mathematically, the gambler’s fallacy is an error: The likelihood of any single coin flip being “tails” is always 50%, regardless of how many times it has come up “heads” in the past.
What is cognitive bias?
Cognitive biases are errors in memory or judgment that are caused by the inappropriate use of cognitive processes ( Table 8.3 “Cognitive Processes That Pose Threats to Accuracy” ).
