Also, memory schemas can affect eyewitness testimony. For example, as stated in Matlin’s Cognition (2012), past view point or schemas can affect present day perceptions. If an eyewitness consciously or unconsciously believes that a certain group of individual are more violent or are more likely to commit crimes than that schema can cloud their perception of the crime they witnessed. Cognitive psychology has extensive research on why eyewitness testimony is unreliable. Holloway’s argument could have been stronger if she incorporated some findings on eyewitness testimony by cognitive psychologists.…
Memory is one the most amazing abilities a human being can have. We have the power to store, retain and recall our past life experiences. Although we can recall our memories, what is important to know is that we also have the power to alter our memories without even knowing. Alteration of memory can happen through current experiences and influences, which is what happened to Jennifer Thompson. She was so sure that Ronald Cotton raped her, that when she faced her actual rapist in court she didn't even recognized him.…
To begin, I do not believe that repressed memories should be allowed for use in court to prosecute the alleged abuser. After reading the article by Elizabeth Loftus, I came to this conclusion because memories have the ability to be manipulated and abused, which studies and analysis's have proven. For example, some professionals contain the ability to provide false memories in which the manipulated person never experienced. The court system could be working with material that has no substantial value what so ever for the prosecution of the abuser. Therefore, I strongly believe the gathered resources to prosecute someone should be accountable or proven information instead of just memories.…
Loftus is one of the leading researchers in memory reconstruction and eyewitness inaccuracy. Memory reconstruction can be critical during the testimony of an eyewitness. Throughout Loftus's experiments she asked direct and false presupposition, must be true for the question to make sense, questions. New false information incorporated into a question may manipulate one into thinking an event occurred when it did not. For example, in experiment 3, participants watched a short film of a car accident involving a white sports car then completed a questionnaire.…
How accurate do you think your memories are? Could you have made a mistake when you described the scene of a crime to a police officer, or did the police officer ask you leading questions that convinced you that the perpetrator had blond hair with blue eyes and was wearing black jeans and a baseball cap? Well Elizabeth Loftus’ research will make you question whether or not the memories you have are accurate. Elizabeth Loftus is an American psychologist who is known for her research on false memories and studies human memory; she is known for the work she does on distortion of memories and implanting false memories into minds. Experiments conducted by Loftus will show how a person’s memories can be changed by things that are suggested.…
In the Radiolab podcast “Outside Westgate” and the article “Why Our Memory Fails Us” by Christopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons, the topic of memories are discussed in both of the works. Unreliable memories can affect our court system and the people involved in the trials. In our society, criminals are tried in court more often than not and the courts require eyewitness testimony from people at to scene of the crime to help convict the person being tried. However, most trials don’t happen immediately after the crime and it could take up to a year or even longer.…
Eyewitness identification relies upon the eyewitness memory and the ability for him or her to retain that information and reporting it straight to the police. Memory is considered as evidence because information is being gathered and encoded in memory. Over time the storage holds in the encoded information in the brain until retrieval occurs so the brain can have access to the information. Although memory is not accurate, errors can occur throughout the process of encoding, storage, or retrieval. Even images and sound can deteriorate over time, which makes it hard to recall them back.…
She has assisted the judicial system in learning all about all of the flaws in eye-witness testimony. Her work has become very important in recducing chances of people being falsely accused of something they did not do. Loftus believes that people can develop a false memory; yet many other psychologists disagree with her. They believe that people have trouble retrieving their memories and that is why there is difficulties. These differences have resulted in many different studies being created.…
Loftus’s work has made a huge contribution to psychology and opened a unique and controversial aspect of psychology and memory. She began her research with investigations of how the mind classifies and remembers information. In the 1970’s she began to reevaluate the direction of her research. Loftus said wants to make a difference in people’s life with her research.…
On a July night in 1984, the homes of two women were broken into and both women were sexually assaulted. During a photo array one of the victims identified the attacker as Ronald Cotton and later confidently confirmed this suspicion during a physical line-up. These identifications mixed with other evidence resulted in the arrest of Ronald Cotton in August later that year. Cotton was later found guilty of both accounts of rape and received a life sentence plus fifty-four years in prison. Elizabeth Thompson, the female victim who identified Cotton as the attacker, provided a compelling and confident testimony during the trial and definitely impacted the juror’s decision in ruling Cotton as guilty.…
In conclusion, both an eyewitness and the reasonable person provide standards in the court of law that are used in determining whether to convict a suspect, as demonstrated by the eyewitness in the State v. Hendersen (2011) case. Unfortunately, both standards are based upon subjective perception. For example, human error in memory processing may decrease the accuracy in an eyewitness testimony. Research should be done on individual interpretation as it relates to an eyewitness or the reasonable person in order to prevent any wrongful…
My memories are my own to explore, to learn from, to play with and shape. The subjectivity of memory by all means supports the claim that our memory is an unreliable way of knowing. As part of her research into the reliability of memory that she mentions in the TED talk, Loftus discovered how easily memories can be created and investigated the ways in which memories could be modified by techniques of…
Two major issues in long-term memory for children are increased suggestibility and errors in source monitoring. This means that they can take false information into their brain and keep that as an actual memory and they can have problems remembering the source of where they learned a piece of information. More and more studies have been conducted investigating the validity of children’s eyewitness testimony and strategies for improving their accuracy. Several studies have been conducted on the long-term memory effects of eye closure on children’s eyewitness testimony. Children can be informative witnesses, but the quality of information they provide is influenced by factors such as the kind of retrieval mechanisms engaged and the quality of communication between the child witness and the adult interviewer.…
Whether by perjury or eyewitness/victim error (Project, 2016). The criminal justice put more than necessary faith in eyewitness testimony. An eyewitness testimony is not a reliable source for the simple fact that only after innocence is proven is it made clear that eyewitness testimony was flawed. Many factors that can lead to eyewitness misidentification include but not limited to the witness lying and PTSD. It is not possible to know the number of wrongful convictions by mistaken identity, because many who are mistakenly identified will never have a chance to prove their innocence (Project, 2016)…
Our experiment examined how modality and word type could affect false recall in a word list paradigm. Manipulating modality (auditory and visual presentation) and word type (concrete and abstract) has never been studied in relation to false recall. We predicted that the word lists that were presented aurally and/or contained concrete terms would show higher rates of false recall for the critical lure words. Approximately, 24 undergraduate students took part in the study. The participants were presented with 12 word lists that were associated with 6 concrete lures, and 6 abstract lures.…