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The role of memory in human life
The role of memory in human life
The role of memory in human life
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Who is Elizabeth Loftus? Some might say a dreamer; others might say the greatest psychological theorist ever, while some might say a great person. According to the information complied by Colleen Born, Elizabeth Loftus was born on October 16, 1944 in the state of California. She grew up with her family here and got her high school diploma. With a love of math growing up she wanted to study it further as a life career, she also wanted to teach but became very interested in the human mind, questioning basic things and focusing on memories especially long term. What happens to them over time? Do they keep the same amount of truth they first originally had or not? Why? She couldn’t make her mind up on what she exactly wanted to do so she ended …show more content…
Four years later she got her PHD in 1970. Throughout the 1970’s she started her research in false memories. Here is where according to Amy Wilson the controversy started and continued until the end of the 1980’s (Wilson, 2002). To this day she has written 22 books (see appendix A) and over 200 articles (Born, 1997). She sparked many peoples interest in memories and understanding how they differ with time.
Elizabeth Loftus is what we know of today as an expert in cognitive psychology. While going through school Elizabeth was very interested by the fact that human memories could change so quickly. Knowing that they could change quickly she wondered if we could make them change in anyway. This is what sparked her theory. To prove this theory, in 1974 she decided to test it out by asking multiple participates to watch a video of an accident. Directly after the video she asked them how fast they believed the cars were going. Each time she used a different word to describe the two cars interaction from collided, to smash, to hit. When she used a more intense word, like smashed or collided, the participants guessed much higher speeds. One week later she then asked everyone if there was glass at the scene. Most
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(n.d.). Elizabeth Loftus.Psychology History. Retrieved November 14, 2013, from http://muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/histor
Brick, N. (n.d.). The Alleged Ethical Violations of Elizabeth Loftus in the Case of Jane Doe. : S.M.A.R.T.'s Ritual Abuse Pages. Retrieved November 14, 2013, from http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/the-alleged-ethical-violations-of-elizabeth- loftus-in-the-case-of-jane-doe/
Carroll, R. (n.d.). repressed memory. - The Skeptic's Dictionary. Retrieved November 14, 2013, from http://www.skepdic.com/repressedmemory.h
Costandi, M. (n.d.). Falsifying memories.the Guardian. Retrieved November 14, 2013, from http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2013/aug/16/elizabeth-loftus- falsifying-memories
Neimark, J. (n.d.). Psychology Today.The diva of disclosure, Elizabeth Loftus. Retrieved November 14, 2013, from
Repressed memories is a topic that has been an ongoing dispute among some, however ac...
The film emphasizes on the power of our long-term memory and our episodic memories. Would we be happier if we forgot about traumatic past experiences? Or are our long-term memories so tangled up with emotions and sensations that our brain is unable to truly let go of long-term memories? The film also looks at the difference between explicit and implicit memories.
Elizabeth Bowen Elizabeth Bowen was a famous short story and novelist writer in the 1900’s. Most of her works were heavily influenced by the horrors of both World Wars and any other war that occurred around the time period. Elizabeth Bowen was one of the few writers in her time period that opened the door for writers to create novels & short stories about the importance of strong women and their issues. Elizabeth Bowen was born on June 7, 1899 in Dublin, Ireland. She went to Downe House School in Kent, Trinity College in Dublin, and Oxford University.
She was born Elizabeth Fishman in Bel Air, California, where she grew up alongside her parents and siblings. Her dad was in the U.S. Army while her mother was a librarian (Zagorski), whom tragically died when Loftus was only 14 years of age. It is thought that her mother could have committed suicide due to depression and it is implied that there was little communication with her father at the time if not for mathematics. She married another psychologist by the name of Geoffrey Loftus in 1968, only to divorce him in 1991 (Neimark). Ms. Loftus was one of the few women to stand out as a mathematical psychologist, despite what others may have thought.
Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera” (Walker, 2013). In fact, human memory is quite the opposite of a video camera; it can be greatly influenced and even often distorted by interactions with its surroundings (Walker, 2013). Memory is separated into three different phases. The first phase is acquisition, which is when information is first entered into memory or the perception of an event (Samaha, 2011). The next phase is retention. Retention is the process of storing information during the period of time between the event and the recollection of a piece of information from that event (Samaha, 2011). The last stage is retrieval. Retrieval is recalling stored information about an event with the purpose of making an identification of a person in that event (Samaha, 2011).
Kowalski, M.(1998, December). Applying the "two schools of thought" doctrine to the repressed memory controversy. The Journal of Legal Medicine. Retrieved September 14, 2000 from Lexis-Nexis database (Academic Universe) on the World Wide Web: http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe
“The Vow” is a movie that encases the turmoil and hardship associated with retrograde amnesia and the classic symptoms and steps associated with recovering and potentially regaining lost memory. Taking into account the information gained through multiple sources; such as, lecture of Mental Health, medical databases, and the personal experiences of Krickett Carpenter, the Vow provides both an accurate and inaccurate depiction of retrograde amnesia.
False Memories are essentially, unintentional human errors, or a state of none-factual creativeness; which results in persons having declared memories of events and situations that did not occur in the actuality of their own lifespan reality history. If they were not unintentional errors they would be deception, which has the nature of a different purpose, morality and legality. False memories have no authenticity, realness or legitimacy, in the subject’s actual life. However they may not be complete false memories: more likely to be a combination of subjugation of previous memory cue’s; or imaginative inventive production, activated and initiated by an origination of external scenario additive as a prompt, indicator or sign, which fuses into memory recall. Therefore ‘False Memories’ are a genuine but inaccurate remembering of experimental data or recall of an genuine occurrences; both of which have rudiments of accuracy and inaccuracy in their transitive attention, giving most ‘False Memories’ partiality.
Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and general public and many researches were done in order to find more about the false memory. The constructive approach to memory, which states that memory is constructed by person based on what really happened in addition to person’s other knowledge, experiences, and expectations, supports the idea of false memory. Just like what constructive approach to memory states, the false memory can be created by person’s knowledge, common biases, and suggestions. The present study was done in order to demonstrate one methodology that biases people to create and recall false memories. The present study is based on Deese’s experiment in 1959 and also on Roediger and McDermott’s experiment in 1995. The participants will be presented with sequence of words visually, and then they would have to classify a set of words as either in the sequence or not in the sequence. Our hypothesis is that people will create false memories and recall distractor words that are related to the sequence of words presented significantly m...
During her early years at Stanford and under the wings of Richard Atkinson, Elizabeth finished her master dissertation addressed as structural variables that determine problem-solving difficulty on a computer-based Teletype (Loftus, 2017). Following her Ph.D. degree, Loftus began working for the New School for Social Research in New York in 1970 and collaborated with social psychologist, Jonathan Freeman (Zagorski, 2005). Her early research with Freeman was the organization of semantic information into long-term memory, but after moving to the University of Washington in 1973, she wanted to focus more on a practical application of semantic information (Zagorski). Elizabeth Loftus was able to obtain research funding from the US Department of Transportation, and soon devoted her career to a forensic application: the study of eyewitness testimony (Loftus). In 1974
Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control process.
According to Sternberg (1999), memory is the extraction of past experiences for information to be used in the present. The retrieval of memory is essential in every aspect of daily life, whether it is for academics, work or social purposes. However, many often take memory for granted and assume that it can be relied on because of how realistic it appears in the mind. This form of memory is also known as flashbulb memory. (Brown and Kulik, 1977). The question of whether our memory is reliably accurate has been shown to have implications in providing precise details of past events. (The British Psychological Association, 2011). In this essay, I would put forth arguments that human memory, in fact, is not completely reliable in providing accurate depictions of our past experiences. Evidence can be seen in the following two studies that support these arguments by examining episodic memory in humans. The first study is by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) who found that memory can be modified by suggestions. The second study is by Naveh-Benjamin and Craik (1995) who found that there is a predisposition for memory to decline with increasing age.
Memory is the tool we use to learn and think. We all use memory in our everyday lives. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. We all reassure ourselves that our memories are accurate and precise. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from the event and the different features of the situation. Yet, people don’t realize the fact that the more you think about a situation the more likely the story will change. Our memories are not a camcorder or a camera. Our memory tends to be very selective and reconstructive.
Cognitive Psychology Psychology is defined as the study of mind, emotion and behaviour. One major perspective within psychology is known as cognitive psychology, which is primarily concerned with the explanation of thought processes through the development of theoretical mental systems. Cognitivism is somewhat broad in it’s approaches to psychology and only linked in it’s goal to create hypothetical mental structures to explain behaviour (“History & Scope Of Psychology”). The exact origins of cognitivism are difficult to pinpoint. Ideas that make up the perspective have been traced back to ancient Greece; however it is in modern times that it has developed to it’s prominent status of today.
Insight is a term that is derived from Middle English expressions such as “inner sight, mental vision, [and] wisdom” (“Insight,” n.d.). According to the Oxford Dictionaries, the technical term for insight is “the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing” (“Insight,” n.d.). Insight is gravely important in regards to problem solving and creative thinking. It is indeed a concept that holds much value in the psychological community and is said to be “essential” to creative thinking (Qinglin, Jiang, & Guikang, 2004). The essence of the phrase ‘insight problem solving’ can be further explained as when a “problem solver fails to see how to solve a problem and then – ‘aha!’ – there is a sudden realization how to solve it” (Jones, 2003). When referring to insight, it is not that the problem solver received a miraculous idea from out of nowhere; the problem solver simply had a brief moment where he or she was completely unaware as to how a solution can be found. Therefore, “the problem solver was competent enough to accomplish the task to begin with” and they simply needed a moment to come up with a solution (Jones, 2003). Moreover, that is where the research and questions in regards to insight play a vital role in the cognitive field of psychology. The question that insight brings to light is, what happens in the mental process of an individual who becomes “stuck” and suddenly they gain insight and are able to create a solution (Jones, 2003)? As one can see, insight is a concept that is significant in cognitive psychology.