Research by Elizabeth Loftus shows that eyewitness...

Key Concepts

Eyewitness Testimony

This is the process by which individuals recall details of an event they have witnessed, often used in legal settings. Research in this area examines the reliability of these memories, how they may be influenced by various factors, and the implications of potential errors during recollection.

Memory Distortion

Memory distortion refers to the phenomenon where memories are altered over time or due to external influences, leading to inaccuracies or changes in the details of the original event. This concept is central to understanding why eyewitness accounts may differ from actual events.

Recognition Memory and False Alarms

Recognition memory involves identifying previously encountered events, objects, or people. Within this process, a false alarm or false positive occurs when an individual incorrectly recognizes a new or non-existent stimulus as familiar. This error is crucial in studies of eyewitness identification where misrecognitions can lead to wrongful identifications.

Misinformation Effect

The misinformation effect is a phenomenon where post-event information, whether accurate or misleading, alters an individual's memory of the original event. This effect illustrates how external cues and suggestive information can lead to the incorporation of false details into one's memory, undermining the integrity of eyewitness testimony.

Transcript

00:01 All right, so this question's asking.

00:02 Research by elizabeth lofus shows that eyewitness recognition is very prone to what psychologists call a automatic encoding, b, a false positive, c, a flash bold memory, or d, recency effect.

00:17 All right.

00:17 So what's nice about these options that we're given is that you could kind of get a sense of what they might mean based on the name of the concept.

00:24 And you'll see what i mean by this.

00:26 So i'm going to start just going down the list and get a sense of what they might mean.

00:30 Giving you some quick identifiers to hopefully help you remember on the definitions of these concepts better.

00:37 So automatic encoding, you could think of it as basically your brain going into like autopilot mode.

00:43 And what i mean by this is automatic encoding really refers to the way memories can kind of just enter your long term with little or no effortful encoding.

00:57 So basically memories enter long.

01:00 Term automatically.

01:03 And that's basically what that means.

01:05 So being automatic meaning no effort or little effort and your long term memory.

01:12 So going back to the question we're talking about research by elizabeth loftus and eyewitness recognition.

01:18 So i probably should have gone into before going into the options, but rather elizabeth loftis, she's a cognitive psychologist and she studied eyewitness recognition with respect to the idea that memory isn't a stable process and that it's constantly changing.

01:40 So she's really focused, her research really focuses on the inaccuracies of memory.

01:45 Something that really set out to me when going over the material that she covers is that her research really sheds light on the idea that what people see and hear about after a specific event, can easily affect the accuracy of their memory, hence going back to the idea that memory is malleable, memory isn't constant, and it's always changing.

02:09 So yeah, if we could remember that, that's something that would help us to, what says, get to the right answer.

02:17 So moving forward, i'm going to, yeah, moving forward, we have false positive.

02:23 And a false positive, it kind of sounds like an oxymoron, but it really helps with understanding what it means.

02:28 And basically a false positive is when you have a stimulus or stimuli that are so similar to what is in your memory that you kind of just believe that what is given to you is right.

02:44 So you could kind of think of this or what i like to think of this is you're basically positive about something that is false.

02:53 So i'm going to draw an arrow.

02:55 So you're positive about false.

03:03 But basically, you're saying that you remember something, well, really, it didn't really happen.

03:09 But you're only saying it's because of how similar it is in stimuli.

03:12 So i want you to remember similar stimuli.

03:20 And that's something we should note later.

03:22 Going after, we have flashbulb memory.

03:24 And basically, flashbulb memory, i like to think of it as like this sort of, it's like the encoding of a specific event because of how...