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How language shapes the way we think
Essay research on false memories
Examples of false memories
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Have you ever wondered why you find yourself recalling memories that, later you realized, they never actually occurred? If your answer is yes, then you’ve probably personally experienced this. If your answer is no, maybe you have indeed experienced this but, you just didnt realize it or didn’t understand it. Well, in order to understand the whole idea behind “false memories”, one must first understand “memory” in general. When asked about “memory” many will often describe it as “the mental capacity of receiving and recalling facts, events, impressions, or of recalling past experiences.” (Squire, 2009) Some of the common examples that are often described includes the process of studying for an exam or the process of trying to recall where …show more content…
Research has shown that even though information may be committed to memory, what is retrieved can be altered during the encoding process. It has been said that, “the recollection of memory can be manipulated and or large aspects of the event can be confabulated.” (Cain,1997). Moreover, the recollection of past experiences can negatively affect future decisions, opinions, and more significant outcomes such as an eyewitness. This type of impact is due to something called, “false memories.” False memories can be defined as “an recollection of an event that never actually occurred.” False memories are said to be normal occurrences and have little impact on lives. However, Loftus and Palmer argue something different. In 1974, Loftus and Palmer conducted an experiment to test out the theory behind “false memories.” Their aim was to show that language used in eyewitness testimony can alter memory. People in this experiment were asked to estimate the speed of motor vehicles using different ways of questioning. Loftus and Palmer asked questions in regards to vehicle speed because typically that is something that most people are bad at estimating. Therefore these people would be more vulnerable and open to suggestions. The procedure of this experiment involved participants watching a video of cars. Participants were asked what they had seen in regards to how that car came in contact with the other car. Loftus and Palmer used words like “crashed, collided, hit, and smashed.” Their findings concluded that the estimated speed was affected by the verb used to describe the cars’ contact with one another. It seem as if participants saw that the verbs as clues of the speed the cars were going. Loftus and Palmer also came to the conclusion that there could only be two reasons for their findings. Those reasons were Response- bias factors or the fact that the memory representation is alter.
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 c...
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
Memory is an important and active system that receives information. Memory is made up of three different stages sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory. According to the power point presentation, sensory memory refers to short storage of memory that allows an individual to process information as it occurs. Short term memory refers to memory that is only available for a limited time. It is information that is held for seconds or sometimes even minutes. Long term memory refers to memory that is stored for a long period of time and it has an unlimited capacity with the ability to hold as much information as possible. Retrieval is key and it allows individuals to have memories. Episodic memory refers to memory for events that we
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...
In class this week we saw cases where our memory fails when recalling information in the past and even seeing changes in real time in front of our eyes. Misinformation is when someone gives information that is incorrect without the intent of giving the incorrect information. This is more likely to happen in situations where the new information would fit someone’s schema of the situation. In a crime example, we can say that a robber has a knife in his hand and pointed it at someone, someone in the situation may have seen a gun instead of the knife and give that as a description. It is the same when someone misreads a word or letter as another in a license plate. It is not on purpose but it is because our brains use shortcuts to link events together to save time. In class we discussed why the new false memory might take hold as if it was the true memory. We said that since the new misinformation was more recent, it would be more easily remembered and projected into the memory. This blocking theory can be used to explain why when someone says they saw a gun at a crime scene to the other witnesses, the other witnesses may be more likely to say that there was a gun and not a knife
During the retrieval process, memories are susceptible to influence and volatility by numerous other cognitive processes such as speculation, imagination, and other personal or outside beliefs. According to Myers and DeWall (2016), there is also a significant positive correlation between the frequency in retrieving the memory to the amount of change a memory may potentially sustain. For example, when an eyewitness is required to retrieve the memory of a crime numerous times, the story’s details are highly subject to change due to the numerous variables that oftentimes fill in the gaps of the fallible memory. In a study conducted by researcher Elizabeth Loftus, different faces were presented to a sample of individuals on a platform similar to that of a police lineup (Myers & DeWall, 2016). After mildly familiarizing her audience to the suspect’s face, Loftus then added two novel faces with similar characteristics. Upon seeing the actual suspect moments earlier, the majority of individuals had chosen the wrong picture (Myers & DeWall, 2016), thus reinforcing the substantial effect of reconstructed
False memories can be formed in many ways. Prior knowledge has been proven to impact perception. A study done by Hastorf and Cantril in 1954 explains this. They had two groups watch a game versus Princeton and Dartmouth and had participants count penalties. On average, the Dartmouth fans counted an equal amount of penalties while the Princeton fans claimed that Dartmouth had twice as many penalties. These results are consistent with a previous conception that Dartmouth fans thought the game was rough but reasonable and the Princeton fans had a previous conception that Dartmouth plays unreasonable (Hunt, 2004). People perceive and encode events differently, so stored memories can be influenced by intervening events and conditions during retrieval can lead to false memories (Roediger, 2002).
There have been several experiments done to try to prove that false memories can indeed be formed. One experiment, for example, was tried with a 14-year-old boy. The boy was told four memories, one of which was falsely constructed but similar to that of a true memory. The memories that were suggested took place when the boy was about 10 years younger. As the false memory was retold to him, he was asked to explain in detail what he had remembered from that event. Surprisingly, he claimed to remember the event, even though it was falsely created by the interviewer and his brother, and went on to explain what he remember to have happened, details and all. After collecting everything he had said about the four memories, he was told that one of the suggested memories was made-up and he was asked to guess which one it may have been. When he couldn’t decide which one it was, he was told that it was in fact the memory of getting lost in a store. He was confused and had trouble believing the truth.
One of the most interesting phenomenon related to memory is memory distortions. One way in which they occur is through suggestibility, where people begin to remember false experiences if researchers suggested to them that they experienced it (Sternberg and Sternberg, 2012). In real-life situations, this is caused in part by memory being constructive “in that prior experiences affects how we recall things and what we actually recall from memory” (Sternberg and Sternberg, 2012). People’s prior experiences, including their bias and expectations, may influence how they experience false memory formations; the formation of false memories is also affected by several possible factors, one of which may be sleep deprivation (Frenda, Patihis, Loftus,
In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.
In psychology we learned that you are never fully able to “vividly” recall memories, and that often times the memories you do recall are inaccurate. While I do not doubt my professor and her expert knowledge in her field, I truly do feel that there are a few memories I can vividly remember with precise detail. Flashbulb memories are the closest we can get to reliving an event, but even then these memories, while often referred to as “vivid” for lack of a better word, are still not completely accurate. The flashbulb memories I have of my favorite place feel factual rather than misconstrued, I know for a fact that these events happened, and it feels just as real as if they happened yesterday, but I am aware that logically I cannot know for sure
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...
Human memory is highly susceptible to modifications due to the compelling nature of false memories. This causes the recollection of events to be different from the way they happened or to be non-existent. (Roediger, Jacoby and McDermott, 1996). The first study by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) was to understand and determine if human’s episodic memory, which is the recollection of past events in their thoughts and feelings at that point of time, could be modified by suggestive information. (Wheeler, Stuss and Tulving, 1997). The independent variables were the types of information (3 true and 1 false) given...
One of Loftus’s earliest experiments on the malleability of memory was conducted together with her colleague John Palmer (Loftus and Palmer, 1974). This experiment has set the foundation to investigate the extent that memories of events can be altered by subsequent exposure to misinformation about those events. After watching a videotape of the automobile collision, participants were asked to answer a questionnaire. Loftus and Palmer found that wording of a suggestive question could influence the likelihood of people’s reporting that they saw things that had not occurred. Specifically, those who experienced the question suggesting that the cars in the film ‘smashed’ into each other were more likely to falsely remember that they had seen broken glass (Law et al., 2010)....
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