PSYCH 111 Chapter Notes - Chapter IV: Elizabeth Loftus, The Final Experiment, Presupposition
Document Summary
People believe that eyewitness reports provide strong evidence in criminal cases because we tend to believe that the way in which a person remembers an event must be the way it actually happened. Psychologists who study memory have drawn the notion of remembering an event as the replaying of the event into question, along with many other common beliefs about the reliability of human memory. When an event is recalled, it is not accurately re-created, but reconstructed. Elizabeth loftus (university of washington) has demonstrated that reconstructive memory is a result of our use of new and existing information to fill in the gaps in our recall of an experience. Usually, these alterations in memory are nothing more than interesting and harmless. However, in legal proceedings, when a defendant"s fate may rest on the testimony of an eyewitness, memory reconstructions can be critical.
