How I Became a Psychologist
Memory Distortion 101
Loftus & Palmer, 1974
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Participants watch a film of an auto accident.
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Asked a series of questions including, "How fast were the cars going when
they ____ into each other?" where the blank is filled in with either smashed,
collided, bumped, hit or contacted.
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Estimates of speed depended on the version of the question asked.
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Participants who heard the smashed version of the question were
more likely to say they saw broken glass.
Loftus, 1979
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Participants saw film of car accident in which car stops at a stop sign
then hits pedestrian.
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Later asked, "Did the car come to a complete stop at the yield sign?" or
"Did the car come to a complete stop at the corner?"
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Participants asked the misleading form of the question more likely to say
they saw a yield sign.
Hyman, Husband & Billings, 1995
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CEQ sent home to parents
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Participants asked about two real events and one false event
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Asked to try to remember event between first and second interview
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At first interview few people had memories for the suggested event
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By second interview about 25% claimed to remember suggested event, and
even produced detailed accounts of what happened.
Piaget's Memory
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Piaget, a famous developmental psychologist, had a memory for an attempted
kidnapping when he was a child.
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He later found out that the event never happened, that it was in fact concocted.
Cognitive Psychologists Study
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Mental Representations
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Mental Processes
Some of the Mental Processes Involved in Memory
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Encoding
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Storage
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Retrieval
Kinds of Questions Cognitive Psychologists Ask About Memory Distortion
When your memory becomes distorted, what happens to the original memory?
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Destructive Updating
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Co-Existence
Bekerian & Bower (1983)
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Relies on the finding that encoding context influences retrieval
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Participants viewed slide presentation of automobile accident
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Asked misleading or neutral questions
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Asked final test questions in one of two orders:
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Random order
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Sequential order (to reinstate context)
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Predictions
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If destructive updating is correct, order shouldn’t matter
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If co-existence is correct, sequential order should produce fewer errors
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In fact, contrary to destructive updating, reinstating context allows participants
to recall the original event despite the misleading information