Other tips were ignored. When the suspects were finally caught, they were driving a blue sedan. As illustrated by this example, we are vulnerable to the power of suggestion, simply based on something we see on the news. Or we can claim to remember something that in fact is only a suggestion someone made. It is the suggestion that is the cause of the false memory. Even though memory and the process of reconstruction can be fragile, police officers, prosecutors, and the courts often rely on eyewitness identification and testimony in the prosecution of criminals.
However, faulty eyewitness identification and testimony can lead to wrongful convictions. How does this happen? In , Jennifer Thompson, then a year-old college student in North Carolina, was brutally raped at knifepoint. After the police were contacted, a composite sketch was made of the suspect, and Jennifer was shown six photos. She chose two, one of which was of Ronald Cotton.
Then she asked the detective if she did OK, and he reinforced her choice by telling her she did great. These kinds of unintended cues and suggestions by police officers can lead witnesses to identify the wrong suspect.
The district attorney was concerned about her lack of certainty the first time, so she viewed a lineup of seven men. By the time the trial began, Jennifer Thompson had absolutely no doubt that she was raped by Ronald Cotton. She testified at the court hearing, and her testimony was compelling enough that it helped convict him. After Cotton was convicted of the rape, he was sent to prison for life plus 50 years.
After 4 years in prison, he was able to get a new trial. On one side of the debate are those who have recovered memories of childhood abuse years after it occurred. They believe that repressed memories can be locked away for decades and later recalled intact through hypnosis and guided imagery techniques Devilly, Research suggests that having no memory of childhood sexual abuse is quite common in adults.
Ross Cheit suggested that repressing these memories created psychological distress in adulthood. The Recovered Memory Project was created so that victims of childhood sexual abuse can recall these memories and allow the healing process to begin Cheit, ; Devilly, On the other side, Loftus has challenged the idea that individuals can repress memories of traumatic events from childhood, including sexual abuse, and then recover those memories years later through therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis, guided visualization, and age regression.
For example, researchers Stephen Ceci and Maggie Brucks , asked three-year-old children to use an anatomically correct doll to show where their pediatricians had touched them during an exam. Ever since Loftus published her first studies on the suggestibility of eyewitness testimony in the s, social scientists, police officers, therapists, and legal practitioners have been aware of the flaws in interview practices.
Consequently, steps have been taken to decrease suggestibility of witnesses. One way is to modify how witnesses are questioned. Another change is in how police lineups are conducted.
Additionally, judges in some states now inform jurors about the possibility of misidentification. Judges can also suppress eyewitness testimony if they deem it unreliable. Forgetting refers to loss of information from long-term memory. But why do we forget? To answer this question, we will look at several perspectives on forgetting.
Sometimes memory loss happens before the actual memory process begins, which is encoding failure. This would be like trying to find a book on your e-reader that you never actually purchased and downloaded. Often, in order to remember something, we must pay attention to the details and actively work to process the information effortful encoding.
Can you accurately recall what the front of a U. The reason is most likely encoding failure. Most of us never encode the details of the penny. We only encode enough information to be able to distinguish it from other coins. Psychologist Daniel Schacter , a well-known memory researcher, offers seven ways our memories fail us.
He calls them the seven sins of memory and categorizes them into three groups: forgetting, distortion, and intrusion [link]. Nathan comes home from school and tells his mom he has to read this book for class. What is going on here is storage decay: unused information tends to fade with the passage of time. In , German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus analyzed the process of memorization.
First, he memorized lists of nonsense syllables. Then he measured how much he learned retained when he attempted to relearn each list. He tested himself over different periods of time from 20 minutes later to 30 days later. The result is his famous forgetting curve [link]. Your memory for new information decays quickly and then eventually levels out. Are you constantly losing your cell phone? Have you ever driven back home to make sure you turned off the stove? Have you ever walked into a room for something, but forgotten what it was?
We are all prone to committing the memory error known as absentmindedness. These lapses in memory are caused by breaks in attention or our focus being somewhere else.
Cynthia, a psychologist, recalls a time when she recently committed the memory error of absentmindedness. When I was completing court-ordered psychological evaluations, each time I went to the court, I was issued a temporary identification card with a magnetic strip which would open otherwise locked doors. As you can imagine, in a courtroom, this identification is valuable and important and no one wanted it to be lost or be picked up by a criminal.
At the end of the day, I would hand in my temporary identification. After I picked up my daughter, I could not remember if I had handed back my identification or if I had left it sitting out on a table.
I immediately called the court to check. It turned out that I had handed back my identification. Why could I not remember that? This is going to bug me until I can remember it!
Have you ever experienced this? Misattribution happens when you confuse the source of your information. Then they broke up and Alejandro saw the second Hobbit movie with someone else. Later that year, Alejandro and Lucia get back together. What if someone is a victim of rape shortly after watching a television program?
Is it possible that the victim could actually blame the rape on the person she saw on television because of misattribution? This is exactly what happened to Donald Thomson. Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her.
Semantic encoding is a specific type of encoding in which the meaning of something a word, phrase, picture, event, whatever is encoded as opposed to the sound or vision of it. Research suggests that we have better memory for things we associate meaning to and store using semantic encoding. What is the cognitive interview technique? The cognitive interview CI is a method of interviewing eyewitnesses and victims about what they remember from a crime scene.
Using four retrievals, the primary focus of the cognitive interview is to make witnesses and victims of a situation aware of all the events that transpired. How is long term memory organized? The theory of connectionism, also referred to as Parallel Distributed Processing or neural networks, asserts that long-term memory is organized by a connectionist networks.
In a connectionist network, information is stored in small units throughout the brain with connections between units or nodes of neurons. How does eyewitness memory work? Eyewitnesses can provide very compelling legal testimony, but rather than recording experiences flawlessly, their memories are susceptible to a variety of errors and biases. They like the rest of us can make errors in remembering specific details and can even remember whole events that did not actually happen.
What does the saying high brow mean? How do I reset my key fob after replacing the battery? Co-authors 5. Memory Processes What roles does memory serve? How do those memory processes affect what we remember? Why do we forget? Forgetting can occur at any memory stage Retrieval from long-term memory Depending on interference,. Blair-Broeker Randal M. Encoding Specificity Memory is improved when information available at encoding is also available at retrieval. Memory Chapter 7 Continued….
How is knowledge organized? Forgetting and Memory Construction. Information Processing Model Encoding — process of getting information into the memory system Storage - retention. Similar presentations.
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