Reconstructive Memory Investigation
Aim:
To investigate how people recall things like stories, pictures or
faces.
Procedure:
Natural experiment. Participants were shown one of eight different
stories or drawings and they were asked to reproduce story or drawing
on a number of occasions, at intervals of increasing lengths.
Findings:
participants distorted the story rather than remembering it exactly.
The transformations were consistent with the participants' western
assumptions and expectations.
Conclusions:
Distortions are necessary rationalisations because the tale did not
fit the pre-existing schemas. The main conclusions were that the
accuracy was rare and that the chain of reproductions was remarkably
persistent.
Criticisms:
* Demand characteristics may have been elicited by the research
stimulus, which resulted in participant reactivity bias. Research
may of lacked validity.
* Lacked objectivity, both because his methods of asking
participants to recall the stimulus at Various intervals, they
were not rigorous, and the natural experiment lacks control of the
variables as any number of factors could have influenced the
recall, such as time of the day, motivation or intelligence of
participant.
Eye Witness testimony - Loftus and palmer (1974)
Aim:
To Show that memory can be affected by wording of questions testing
the memory of an experience. Witnesses can be extremely unreliable.
Procedure:
150 participants were shown a film of an accident between tow cars,
and asked to fill in a questionnaire about the accident. The important
question involved the speed of the cars at the point of impact. The
question was phrased differently for different groups of participants,
some were asked 'how fast were the two cars going when they hit each
other' others were asked the same question but with smash, collide,
bumped or contracted.
Findings:
The average speeds the participants gave in the answer to the question
In the magic of the mind author Dr. Elizabeth loftus explains how a witness’s perception of an accident or crime is not always correct because people's memories are often imperfect. “Are we aware of our minds distortions of our past experiences? In most cases, the answer is no.” our minds can change the way we remember what we have seen or heard without realizing it uncertain witnesses “often identify the person who best matches recollection
In the chapter, “The Mirror with a Memory”, the authors, James Davidson and Mark Lytle, describe numerous things that evolved after the civil war, including the life of Jacob Riis, the immigration of new peoples in America, and the evolution of photography. The authors’ purpose in this chapter is to connect the numerous impacts photography had on the past as well as its bringing in today’s age.
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).
Amici curiae is a social psychologist and legal scholar who studies the effects of the Recovered Memory Syndrome on individuals’ behaviors and judicial practices. Amici has conducted research and published several peer-reviewed articles explaining the role of hypnosis in uncovering repressed memories and related traumas that come along with it. This brief intends to provide the Court with relevant and current literature explaining the recovered memory phenomenon and its relationship with psychotherapeutic techniques where recovery of memories often occurs. Research presented by amici demonstrates that cases of sexual abuse, real or imagined, must be given careful consideration as victims undergo significant emotional
a very good model for the time it was made and it is based on reliable
I found The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson overall very interesting. It is a realistic fiction book and it contains a lot of events that happen in Hayley Kincains life. Her father is constantly getting drunk and quitting his jobs because of his PTSD that he developed from being a former veteran. She's constantly struggling with succeeding in school and watching after her dad. “It started in detention. No surprise there, right?” She was practically homeschooled for 5 years since her dad constantly moved to new places. She also develops a love interest with a boy she was supposed to be tutored by. She developed feelings for him and he turned into her boyfriend. She has to watch out for him so her dad won't find out about
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).
Minor consequences, might for instance, be confusing where one has placed something, like car keys. Such confusion can result in a simple inconvenience such as, the wasting of time. Although more serious consequence might for instance occur when one’s memory tricks the individual into giving false eyewitness accounts that might be costly to him, or other third parties. As such, it is important to critically analyze the dynamics of false memory formation and highlight methods that could be used to identi...
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.
People fail to notice when they are presented with something different from what they originally chose and tend to come up with explanations as to why they picked that specific choice. In this research paper, Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, and Loftus discuss how choice blindness can lead to distorted eyewitness memories. In their experiment, the studied if the participants in their research realized modifications to their memory reports and if these changes could possibly effect the participants’ memory. Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, and Loftus conducted two different experiments. Experiment 1 was constructed on two self-sourced vs. other-sourced between participants and two misinformation vs. control within participants. They had participants watch a slideshow that showed a woman intermingling with three other characters and one of them steals her wallet. Then they completed a personality measure in 15 minute retention interval which was followed by questions about their memories from the slideshow. After, they were given another 15 minute retention interval and then shown their responses to the memory question, but three of their responses were revised. According to Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, and Loftus (2016), “experiment 1 demonstrated that when witnesses were exposed to altered versions of their own memory reports for episodic details of an event, their memories changed to be consistent with
The Multistore Model of Memory The multistore model is a representation of memory based on having more than one different kind of store for remembered information. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) proposed this model based on evidence related to the separate stores of memory (e.g. serial position: primacy recency, forgetting etc.). It suggests that memory comprises of three separate stores, the sensory memory store, the short-term memory and the long-term memory, each store having a specific and relatively inflexible function: Information enters and is initially stored in SM which holds information for very brief periods of time if the information is not concentrated on. However, if a person’s attention is focused on material in Sensory Memory, this leads to STM storage which has limited capacity and relatively short duration.
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.
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.
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.
One of the fundamental and core functions of computers is data storage. The computer has components that retain digital data and record media used for computation. The data stored is in form of bits and bytes. Fast but temporary storage in the computer are often referred to as memory while storage can refer to the storage devices that are not directly accessible, by the Central Processing Unit. Computers use several memory types organized in a storage hierarchy, in the Central Processing Unit. The memory hierarchy consists of CPU registers, SRAM caches, external caches, DRAM, paging systems and virtual memory on the hard drive of the computer. Initially, storage devices were referred to as memory, but nowadays memory refers to a Random Access Memory (RAM) that is a semiconductor storage device. The first manufactured computers used magnetic drums and William tubes for data storage, which had low access rates (Parsons & Oja, 2011, p 76).