The Reliability of Memory

It is said that there are many different versions to a story. There is one persons story, then there is an other person’s story, and then, there is the truth. “Our memories change each time they are recalled. What we recall is only a facsimile of things gone by.” Dobrin, Arthur. "Your Memory Isn't What You Think It Is." (online magazine). Psychology Today. July 16, 2013. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i-right/201307/your-memory-isnt-what-you-think-it-is. Every time a story is told, it changes. From Disney movies to books, to what we tell our friends and colleagues. Sometimes the different sides to the story challenge the

The study of creation of false memories has been a topic of interest since the 1930s when Bartlett (1932) conducted the first experiment on the topic. Though the results of this experiment were never replicated, they contributed greatly to research by distinguishing between reproductive and reconstructive memory (Bartlett 1932 as cited in Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Reproductive memory refers to accurate production of material from memory and is assumed to be associated with remembering simplified materials (e.g., lists). Reconstructive memory emphasizes the active process of filling in missing elements while remembering and is associated with materials rich in meaning (e.g., stories).

Eyewitness testimonies are based on a person’s ability to recall what took place accurately. Memory research has proven that a person’s memory is not a recording but it is reconstructive. Loftus and Palmer’s study set out to prove that the memory could be reconstructed through the use of language.

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

False memories are an apparent recollection of an event that did not actually occur. The reason why false memories happen are due to the fact that one's brains can only handle so much.There has been several experiment pertaining to the phenomenon, to find how it works.In the next part of the experiment the psychologist showed the participants a word list.False memories are very common and can happen to anyone. On very rare occasions false memories can be harmful to someone and the people around them.False memories are so common that they affect all of a person's memories. False memories can be made more clear by others memories or they could become more distorted. False memories have caused many wrongful convictions. A psychologist

Every act of remembering is also, intrinsically, an act of forgetting. Giving preference to particular details of an event lessens the immediacy of others. Thus, memory is its own, unique narrative culled from an almost endless sea of details present, and sometimes not present, in the original event. Memory is the past, reformulated and interpreted through the lens of the present (Huyssen 1995). When an event is commemorated through a physical act of memory, the narrowing of possible details becomes even more finely tuned, limited by the physical scope of possibilities for bodies in a three-dimensional space.

Moreover, research also examined the effects of age on participants in regards to the onset of false memory. With materials and testing procedures that have been repeatedly found to produce higher levels of false memory, older children are more susceptible to generating false memories than younger children (Holliday, Brainerd & Reyna, 2010). This is particularly realistic in the DRM lists (Holliday, Brainerd &

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.

The area of cognitive psychology that this article focuses on, is the impact that cognitive interviews have on false memories and beliefs. A false memory appears when a person recalls memories of events that did not actually happen to him or her. Nonetheless, a study conducted by S.J. Sherman and M.B. Powell, consisted of exposing people to false events using instructions taken from a cognitive interview, a method of interviewing and questioning people about events they may have witnessed (Sharman et al., 2013). In this specific study, researchers examined the integration that cognitive interviews may have on making participants feel more confident towards the validity of their childhood experience, regardless or not whether it actually happened

In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.

This project is based on false memory and asks the question, “Will words that are presented visually evoke false recall of an associated word more than if words are presented aurally?” False memory has been defined as, “A mental experience that is mistakenly taken to be a veridical representation of an event from one’s personal past. Memories can be false in relatively minor ways, believing one last saw the keys in the kitchen when they were in the living room or in major ways that have profound implications for oneself and others like, mistakenly believing one is the originator of an idea or that one was sexually abused as a child (Smelser & Baltes, 2001, p. 5254). How memory works is an important area that psychologist have been searching for answers to since the early 1950’s and has led to some controversial theories.

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

An individual’s ability to use have the clearest more accurate memory has always been one of heated debate. False memories from the same constructive process that produces true memories exposing a very concerning fault in our reasoning of memory. This idea of false memory is text in this experiment by using a sequence of 16 words, along with both unrelated and related distractor words. The 43 participant, who is an ungraduated at Hope College enrolled in PSYCH 340, is shown a list of 16 words and asked to recall them. Some of the recalled words were from the original list and some of the others were unrelated or related distractors. It was hypothesized that the related distractor words would be more likely be reported than the unrelated distractor

In the first follow-up interview, roughly eighteen percent remembered the false event and in the second follow-up, twenty-five percent remembered the false event (Hyman, Husband, & Billing 1995). As this study indicates, memories are more susceptible to modification when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade. Being lost, however, is not the same as being abused. Another crucial component involved in the formation of false memories is the imagination inflation. Loftus (1997) found that the more often an individual imagined an unperformed action, the more likely they were to later on remember having performed it.

Memory facilitates necessary functions in daily life activities, but it is not a perfect mechanism in operation. Goldstein (2011) states that memory is, “…the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present” (p.116). There are many adaptive functions within the complexities of the human memory system and the interlinked constructs between each function leave room for doubt in the accuracy of recollection. Study of the human mind has opened avenues of discovery on the inner workings of our brains and the resulting knowledge suggests that humans are prone to creating false memories and even remembering things that never actually happened. A great deal of information has been written explaining the nature of memory errors and within the following pages a real-life case offers a glimpse into how recall distortions and memory errors can wield unpleasant consequences. Memory errors can be avoided with a significant effort, but the truth remains that no one is perfect and memories are subject to individual bias.