While researching some interesting topics about science, I found a very unique and mind blowing article. I found a few more articles about the same topic which is particularly about how memory can be altered by your brain. There are studies, experiments, and professors who study this and has published their article online; to give us a better sense of how our brains work and the things that we should be aware of. In recent studies, human brain experts found that your memories can be changed every time you try to recall it. The goal of this paper is to explain misinformation effect, false memory, and effect of memory distortion.
Misinformation effect happens when the recall of episodic memories become less accurate because of post-event information (Zaragoza 36). 1 “The new information that a person receives works backward in time to distort memory of the original event.” 2 In other words new information that comes into our brain will go back and change what we thought of the original event. I think this is a very unique and new thing to know because we are used to relying on our memories and trusting it completely. A leading psychologist and expert in brain memory did a few study to support the misinformation effect.
In one of the study, participants were shown a few slides about a car stopping in front of a yield sign. After showing the participants the slides, they were given misinformation of the slides that the car
Chu 2 stopped in front of a stop sign. Results of the experiment showed that the participants that were given misinformation are more likely to report seeing the stop sign than those who were given the correct information. (3) This shows that what we see isn’t what is always correct, this study give us an idea...
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3Vornik, L.; Sharman, Stefanie; Garry, Maryanne (2003). "The power of the spoken word:
Sociolinguistic cues influence the misinformation effect". Memory. 2003. Web. 16 March 2014
inguistic_cues_influence_the_misinformation_effect/file/9fcfd505ba9eeec5b9.pdf>
4-5McHugh, PR (2008). Try to remember: Psychiatry's clash over meaning, memory and mind.
Dana Press. 2008. Web 6 March 2014
6. Murphy, W. "Debunking 'false memory'myths in sexual abuse cases". 2004. Print.
7. Totten, Michael. “The Misinformation Effect in the Interviewing of Witnesses.” Legal Source. 2 April
2013. Web. 29 March 2014
<.http://www.legalsource360.com/index.php/the-misinformation-effect-in-the-interviewing-of-witnesses-195/>
“ Some Close Encounters of a Mental Kind ” by Stephen Jay Gould is about the tendency for our minds to ‘lie’ to ourselves because of a certain key phrase that can cause people to believe certain events happened. This can be done by altering the types of question you want the victim to hear. It can be a certain modified questions or the way the question are presented to us that can cause our answers to be slightly false.
Roediger III, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cogntion, 21, 803-814.
One of the last types of ways investigators are coached to detect deception is in the behavioral attitudes of a person being interviewed such as being unconcerned or over anxious (Kassin, 2005). The success rate of looking for these cues are very successful in telling if an individual is being deceitful and has surpassed any laboratory tests conducted on the subject. The laboratory test however did reveal some interesting facts. The research showed that people who had training and experience did not score better than the control group who received no training. In fact all individuals scored at the chance level with the people who had training scored just above chance or at the chance level. To check if special training in the detection of deception was more accurate a study ...
False information provided by people, perhaps because believed it is what the interviewer wants to hear, The Hawthorne effect, invalidates it (Taylor, 1995).
Steffens, M., & Mecklenbräuker, S. (2007). False memories: Phenomena, theories, and implications. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie/Journal Of Psychology, 215(1), 12-24. doi:10.1027/0044-3409.215.1.12
Valentine, T., & Maras, K. (2011). The effect of cross-examination on the accuracy of adult eyewitness testimony. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25, 554-561. doi: 10.1002/acp.1768
One cannot always accurately reproduce information due to the stages of memory processing that occur after witnessing an event. With each stage, the accuracy of the memory decreases. According to Aronson, Wilson, and Akert (2013), the first stage is acquisition. Acquisition is the process by which people notice only certain information in a particular setting because they cannot perceive everything around them. Also, witnessing a crime often occurs quickly, unexpectedly, under poor viewing conditions, or while focus is on another object, such as a gun. These circumstances significantly decrease the amount of accurate information that the observer will acquire, and the likelihood for accurate reproduction of the event in testimony is lessened (Aronson et al., 2013). According to Fradella (2006), acquisition is dependent upon the same individualized factors that are present in perception and expectations. Expectations impact what information an observer seeks out or avoids, ultimately impacting their overall memory (Fradella, 2006).
...T. M. (1997). Can the jury disregard that information? The use of suspicion to reduce the prejudicial effects of retrial publicity and inadmissible testimony. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(11), 1215-1226.
Grubin, D., & Madsen, L. (2005). Lie detection and the polygraph: A historical review. Journal
Similar studies were done to a different set of college students and they tended to have the same results. After giving as much detail about each memory, the students were interviewed about what they may have written done about what they had remembered. During the last part of the experiment, each of the students were debriefed and asked to guess which memory they believed was false.
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...
...Dermott, K. B. (1996). Misinformation effects in recall: Creating false memories through repeated retrieval. Journal of Memory and Language, 5(2), 300-318. doi: 10.1006/jmla.1996.0017
...pporting details. At the conclusion of the article, the authors share their thoughts on how it might be virtually impossible to determine when a memory is true or false. I also like their willingness to continue the investigations despite how difficult it might be to obtain concrete answers.
Eyewitness testimony is especially vulnerable to error when the question is misleading or when there’s a difference in ethnicity. However, using an eyewitness as a source of evidence can be risky and is rarely 100% accurate. This can be proven by the theory of the possibility of false memory formation and the question of whether or not a memory can lie. For instance, a group of students saw the face of a young man with straight hair, then heard a description of the face supposedly written by another witness, one that wrongly mentioned light, curly hair. When they reconstructed the face using a kit of facial features, a third of their reconstructions contained the misleading detail, whereas only 5 percent contained it when curly hair was not mentioned (Page 359). This situation shows how misleading information from other sources can be profoundly altered.
What is false memory? False memory is a psychological phenomenon in which a person recollects something differently than the way it actually happened or recalls an event that never existed.