Summary: The Influence Of Alcohol On False Memory

The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: Many children and people were harm due to false memory accusations. In the case, the Social Worker, Kee MacFarlene her style of interviewing the children was wrong and misleading to the witnesses. A social worker is conducting an interview, must be done in an ethical manner and style. Their goal is to have the witness give the correct and honest answers to the questions asked. A valuable lesson for a Social worker when they are speaking with a client is not to contaminate their client’ memory is to ask questions that are not suggestive, leading, and misleading questions. After viewing the different Elizabeth Loftus clips, I realize that your memory can be easily manipulated, by making you believe something

Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder, we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully, or it can be contaminated. A case I would like to mention is the Calvin Willis Case. One night in 1982, three young girls were sleeping alone in a Shreveport, Louisiana home when a man in cowboy boots came into the house and raped the oldest girl, who was Ten years old. When police started to investigate the rape, the three girls all remembered the attack differently. One police report said the Ten year old victim didn’t see her attacker’s face. Another report which wasn’t introduced at trial said she identified Calvin Willis, who lived in the neighbourhood. The girl’s mother testified at trial that neighbours had mentioned Willis’s name when discussing who might have committed the crime. The victim testified that she was shown photos and told to pick the man without a full beard. She testified that she didn’t pick anyone, police said she picked Willis. Willis was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. In 2003, DNA testing proved Willis’ innocence and he was released. He had served nearly Twenty Two years in prison for a crime he didn’t

Elizabeth Loftus is a cognitive psychologist. I chose her because I love criminal justice and psychology. Her studies have to do with both, so she was the perfect choice. She is known for studying memory. She plays a huge role in psychology and the legal system. She conducts studies about how memory affects eyewitness testimonies. She has written more than 400 publications (McNally, 2007). She is different than other psychologists studying memory because she investigates memory for naturalistic events (McNally, 2007). She does not study memory by using a list of words or studying nonsense syllables like Ebbinghaus did. Elizabeth Loftus has published plenty of articles talking about how alibis being inconsistent does not equate to them being liars. Inconsistency does not equal accuracy. She has also written articles about how confidence does not equate to honesty.

Researcher Elizabeth Loftus, encapsulated the reliability of human memory and the notion about the inaccuracy of eyewitness accounts. She hypothesized that if eyewitnesses are asked questions with false presuppositions, the erroneous information will be incorporated into the witness’s memory and alter the memory of the witnessed event.

This article is the study of false memories in aging adults with and without Alzheimer Disease. The study worked with two groups’ twenty four with mild onset of Alzheimer and twenty four that didn’t have mild onset of Alzheimer (p. 9). False memories are a common development that happens as the mind ages. This article wanted to record if Alzheimer disease increases or decrease false memory in adults. The reason for this study is that other studies show that adults with Alzheimer Disease have “slightly lower” false memories (p.9).

The article reports on several cases where testimony from an adamant eyewitness was proven to be completely incorrect during the course of a trial, or has been found erroneous when new evidence has come to light after the conviction of an innocent person. As “From Finding to Evaluating Sources” warns, “you need to evaluate the extent to which the information is recent, accurate, and consistent with information you find in print sources and clearly regulated sites” (123). One of the benefits of including this news article as a popular source is how it explicitly lists various cases where memory malleability was uncovered over the course of a trial. Such discoveries are easy to very because they are widely reported in other media and court records. In one of the cases Hayasaki describes, “a decade after the crime, an arrest was made. When [the witness] saw a photograph of a suspect in the newspaper, she no longer doubted her ability to recall.” The problem with her identification was that it was a 10 years after the crime, the suspect looked nothing like her original composite, and the newspaper headline subsequently framed the suspect with the words “Knox man charged in ’91 murder of

Elizabeth Loftus explains how eyewitnesses are not always reliable because the human mind can distort memories and make you think you remember one thing when that never happened at all. To start, sometimes these eyewitnesses are right and can really help a case, but when they are not that’s where the issue is especially when they’re dealing with a death sentence case. Stated by Loftus “One factor that can affect a trial is a testimony from an actual witness” what I believe is being said here is though eyewitnesses are not always reliable they can a big role in a trial. The main point that Loftus argues is “are we aware of our minds distortions” and the answer is no most of the time, our mind alters our memories through mind distortion making it difficult to rely on an eyewitness. One way to solve this issue would to have a psychologist or a “expert testimony” speak to the jury on how our memories can become distorted. Dr. Loftus’ arguments have proven that eyewitness testimonies are not always reliable but there are ways around the issues that we have with

By being able to see cases where false memories had the potential to ruin lives, and harm individuals, it brings more awareness to the severity of the problem at hand. After looking at these individual cases, it was a helpful transition into learning about the study Loftus and her team were creating to test this hypothesis. The study that she created went hand in hand with the idea that false memories are formed most likely when another individual confirms them. For a certain part of this study, her team claimed to the participants that a relative had confirmed each of the memories placed in front of them, including the false memory. When an individual feels as though someone close to them has a memory of something, they tend to see it as real for themselves.

This study, and many before it, relied on three main conditions that will result in false memory. First of all, the participants must believe that the suggested memory

When alcohol is consumed it attacks and impairs a variety of cognitive processes (Norton & Halay, 2001). Some of these cognitive processes include: executive decision making, impulse control, modification of emotion, and future preparation (Norton et al., 2001). The focus of this Research Paper will be to examine the cognitive effects of alcohol consumption and any correlations between impulse control (impulsivity) and alcohol consumption. Research studies have shown that alcohol use disrupts the neurocognitive processes involved in self-regulation and is associated with a high level of behavioral disinhibition, which is characteristic of the personality trait impulsivity (Noel, Tomberg, Verbanck & Campanella, 2010).

Multiple studies have been conducted that investigate false memory in humans focusing on word recall, processing and retention interval, and auditory imaging. Roediger and McDermott (1995) suggest that individuals who participated in their study are more likely to recall the critical words and lures if the list of words presented were closely associated to them. Critical lures are the tendency to recall words that are associated with presented information (Kreiner, Price, Gross, Appleby, 2004). Roediger and McDermott (1995) also suggest that the same individuals will be more familiar with the critical lures compared to the words actually presented (Roediger, McDermott 1995), while other studies suggest similar conclusions. This paper will discuss the effect of false memory with word association, the ability to retain the words, and auditory learning and testing with research done by Roediger, McDermott, Gallo, Pilotti, Jacoby, and Thapar.

One point which lowers the credibility of Loftus's studies is that they were are artificially created, none of them were real, also the importance of the events would have not been the same, as the participants knew that they were not effecting someone life (by sending them to jail etc). The participants were not actually there, they don't get to feel the emotion or the atmosphere were can effect recall. However the study is supported by another Loftus and Loftus (1980) found that recall was no more accurate when the participants were offered money, however some people are more or less motivated by money. Loftus also theorized that with the introduction of the misleading information the original information is deleted and replaced by the new false memory.

a memory is not an accurate representation of the truth. In simpler terms, is that when people tried to recall who the murder was, they did not actually point to the right one, people

I chose to gain more observation on state dependent learning and the effects of alcohol on explicit memory. The state dependent learning requires to match the internal mood present during encoding and retrieval. As for encoding specificity the context of encoding and retrieval occurred must be matched. Encoding is the information transferred from short term memory into long term memory. Retrieval is transferring the information from long term into short term memory so that it can be used. College students who study in quite environments that mimic the testing day tend to perform better than others. Changing an individual’s internal environment with alcohol affects their ability to be aware of memories. High dose of alcohol leads to black outs

"Memory associations between negative emotions and alcohol on the lexical decision task predict alcohol use in women" (Campos-Melady, 2012) is a report of new research that studies the relationship of negative reinforcement and alcohol use in women. This study used the Lexical Decision Task (LDT) to examine the relationship with 78 female participants using alcohol and emotion words in a questionnaire. The introduction and abstracts examine previous research, their methods, and other research literature, as well as their results relating to the negative emotional associations and alcohol consumption.