Loftus And Pickrell's Lost In A Shopping Mall

Memory can be defined as the process in which information is stored, encoded, and retrieved. The psychological study of memory has greatly contributed to the understanding with situations that arise in court, such as false memories in eyewitness testimonies. In fact, early studies (Bartlett 1932) show how there can be distortions in memory to our experiences. Bartlett calls it schemas, which are simplified mental representations of knowledge that informs a person about what to expect from a variety of experiences and situations. He conducted a study where the British participants hear a story or see a drawing and are told to reproduce a Native American folk tale. The participants were unfamiliar with the context and thus, distorted the story to fit their

The study “Lost in a Shopping Mall” conducted by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) had an aim to attempt to implant false memory and support the theory of false memories by asking relatives of the participants to provide researchers with three childhood events of the participant, the researchers then present the three events with one false event of the participant being lost in the mall, the participants were then asked to recall each of these events. The results that were found were that the participants were able to remember 68% of the true events both in the booklet and the interviews and 29% of the participants remembered the false events in the booklet where as the first and second interview 25% of the participants remembered the false event. Participants tend to use more words to describe the memory of a true event with average of 138 words, while describing the false event only an average of 49.9 words were used. Thus, proving that false memories can be created and that memory is not a reliable form of