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Flashbulb memories
Flashbulb memories involve the vivid recall of what individuals were doing when a
major event occurred. This event may be a public or a private occurrence.
Describe what you were doing when you heard that Princess Diana had died.
Is the memory vivid and distinct in time?
Brown & Kulik (1977) asked people a series of questions about 10 major events.
Participants remembered where they were, what they were doing and the emotional
impact it had. These memories may be seen as 'special' and are thought to involve
special brain mechanisms.
Rubin & Kozin (1984) showed that flashbulb memories are particularly powerful for
personal events, such as love at first sight.
Ask your mother/father about your birth or onset of labour?
McCloskey (1988) suggested that flashbulb memories are as prone to forgetting as
ordinary memories.
Bohannon (1988) suggested that flashbulb memories are not prone to forgetting
when the event produced strong emotional reactions.
Repression (Freud)
Repression, according to Freud (1800s) is the unconscious forgetting of
traumatic events, feelings, thoughts because they are too painful to remember.
These memories are said to be repressed or 'pushed out' of consciousness into the
unconscious and are very difficult to recall. These repressed memories may be the
cause of mental abnormality as they express themselves in some other way.
There is increasing evidence of repressed memory in cases of childhood sexual
abuse. Williams (1994) examined records of young women who had been treated
for sexual abuse as children and seventeen years later 38% of them had no
conscious recall of the abuse.
Zimbardo (1995) reported the case of Eileen. In 1989 Eileen suddenly remembered
the reason for her childhood friend, Susan's, disappearance twenty years earlier.
Eileen's father had raped and murdered her. Eileen had repressed this memory due
to threats from her father and the understandable trauma it caused. Her father was
sentenced to life imprisonment.
Often however repressed memories are difficult to substantiate which has led to the
notion of False Memory Syndrome (Pynoos & Nader 1989) where recall of socalled repressed memories may be false although real to the person remembering
them.
Repression as a theory of forgetting is based on Case Study evidence and therefore
is impossible to generalise from or replicate. Case studies are highly subjectiveand
tend to personal and subjective interpretations.
Reconstructive Memory - Bartlett (1932)
Bartlett's theory of Reconstructive Memory is crucial to an understanding of the
reliability of eye witness testimony (EWT) as he suggested that recall is subject to
personal interpretation dependent on our learnt or cultural norms and values- the
way we make sense of our world.
In other words, we tend to see and in particular interpret and recall what we
see according to what we expect and assume is 'normal' in a given situation.
Bartlett referred to these complete mental pictures of how things are expected to be
as Schemas. These schemas may, in part, be determined by social values and
therefore prejudice.
Schemas are therefore capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconsciously
'unacceptable' information in order to 'fit in' with our existing knowledge or schemas.
This can, therefore, result in unreliable eyewitness testimony.
Bartlett tested this theory using a variety of stories to illustrate that memory is an
active process and subject to individual interpretation or construction.
Have a go! Read the following story and then remove from screen and attempt to
recall it.
The War of the Ghosts.
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and
while they were it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries and they
thought; 'Maybe this is a war-party.' They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a
log.
Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe
coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe and they said; 'What do you
think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the
people.'
One of the young men said; 'I have no arrows.'
'Arrows are in the canoe,' they said.
'I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But
you,' he said, turning to the other, 'May go with them.'
So one of the young men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors went
on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the
water and began to fight, and many were killed. But presently, one of the young men
heard one of the warriors say; 'Quick let us go home. That Indian has been hit.'
Now he thought; 'Oh, they are ghosts.' He did not feel sick, but he had been shot. So
the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young man went back to his house and
made a fire. And he told everybody and said; 'Behold, I accompanied the ghosts, and
we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed and many of those that attacked us
were killed. They said I was hit, but I did not feel sick.'
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose, he fell down. Something
black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and
cried. He was dead.
According to Bartlett your recall will show a westernised interpretation of this
American Indian folk tale thus illustrating your subjective memory construction rather
than accurate objective recall of events. How might this idea be applied to
eyewitness testimony of criminal occurrences.
Reconstructive Memory - Loftus (1974)
Loftus drew on the ideas of Bartlett and conducted research illustrating factors
which lead to inaccurate recall of eye-witness testimony. Loftus & Palmer (1974)
conducted two laboratory experiments to illustrate this reconstrutive memory and
how this is influenced by questioning techniques used by the police.
Experiment One.
45 participants involved using an independent measures design.
Participants were shown films of traffic accidents.
They were then given a general account of what they had just seen and asked a
series of questions about it.
The critical question asked was 'About how fast were the cars going when they
HIT each other?'
OR the word 'HIT' was replaced by either 'SMASHED', 'COLLIDED', 'BUMPED' or
'CONTACTED'.
The results suggested that participants recall was influenced by the word used - the
independent variable. The word 'smashed' led to the fastest speed estimate and the
word 'contacted' the slowest.
Experiment Two.
The experiment above could be explained by response bias - pressure from
interrogator or a change in participants recall of the event because of word used in
question.
Loftus & Palmer conducted this experiment in order to test which explanation was
accurate.
150 students were tested using independent measures design.
They were then given a general account of what they had seen. They were then
divided into groups of 50.
The first group was asked 'How fast were the cars going when they hit each
other?'
The second group were asked 'How fast were the cars going when they smashed
into each other?'
The third group were not asked the question at all and acted as a control group.
One week later they were asked a series of questions about the road traffic accident,
one of which was the critical question, 'Did you see any broken glass? Yes or
No?'
There was no broken glass in the film itself. The results suggested that the word
'SMASHED' not only led to estimates of faster speeds but also increased the
likelihood of the participants recalling seeing broken glass when none was in the film.
This research suggests that memory is easily distorted by questioning technique and
information acquired after the event can merge with original memory causing
inaccurate recall or reconstructive memory. The addition of false details to a memory
of an event is referred to as conflabulation.
The Loftus & Palmer experiment can be criticised for lacking ecological validity. It
employed independent measures design and therefore may be explained by
individual differences/subject variables. The controlled conditions make for sound
reliability the ethics of this design may be questioned, as the participants were
deceived but this was necessary in order to validate findings and minimise demand
characteristics. The participants may have been distressed/traumatised by the film
and this emotional reaction may have influenced their interpretation of the event. See
Research Methods. This kind of research has led to recommendations concerning
police interview techniques and can be used by lawyers in court to question the
accuracy of EWT.
Face Recognition
The work of Loftus & Palmer can be applied to face recognition. This area of EWT
has however been studied directly to order to avoid false accusations.
Cohen (1966) showed how faces are not seen in isolation but that they are
perceived or influenced both by the event itself and by people's schema, social
norms and values and therefore stereotyped images.
Cohen referred to this as Cross-Race Identification Bias. Cohen suggested that
people find it easier to identify people from their own race than people from a
different race. This is reflected in the statement, 'They all look the same!'
Therefore when an eyewitness and a possible suspect are from different races the
identification of the suspect must be treated with caution. Cohen illustrated this by
asking 86 shop workers in Texas to identify three customers, one White, one AfricanAmerican and one Mexican-American who had purchased something from the shop
that day. One third of the customers were White, one third African-American and one
third Mexican-American.
The accuracy of their recall was different for customers of different races and was
related to the race of the shop worker. This research may have involved demand
characteristics and individual differences.
Cohen points out that it is difficult to recognise people out of the context in which you
would ordinarily have contact with them, 'It is hard to recognise your bank manager
at the disco or your dentist at in evening dress', (Cohen 1996). Therefore the
difference between the actual scene of the crime and an identity parade may be
misleading as memory is often cue- or context-dependent.
Young showed how we are more likely to wrongly identify someone the less we
know them. Young asked 22 participants to record how many times they made errors
in recognising people over an eight week period. There were 314 cases of mistaking
a stranger for someone they knew because of similarity or dress or build. This
research has implications for face recognition in identity parades.
Dood & Kirschenbaum (1973) illustrate the problem of facial recognition by their
Case Study of Ron Shatford.
The witness had described the suspect as 'attractive'. Shatford was placed in an
identity parade in which in which he was the only 'attractive' member. He was
wrongly selected.
Case studies are unrepresentative, making generalisations impossible.
Well (1993) showed how the witness assumes the suspect to be present in an
identity parade which again may lead to false recognition.
Lindsay (1991) suggested that suspects in an identity parade should be viewed one
at a time rather in a line-up in order to avoid functional size (fair number of feasible
suspects to chose from) and reduce possibility of mistaken identity.
Bull & Rumsey proposed that we judge people to be criminal on their appearance.
Eyewitness Testimony
Eyewitness testimony is a legal term. It refers to an account given by people of an
event they have witnessed.
For example they may be required to give a description at a trail of a robbery or a
road accident someone has seen. This includes identification of perpetrators, details
of the crime scene etc.
Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and
human memory.
Juries tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a
reliable source of information. However, research into this area has found that
eyewitness testimony can be affected by many psychological factors:
o
Anxiety / Stress
o
Reconstructive Memory
o
Weapon Focus
o
Leading Questions (Loftus and Palmer, 1974)
Anxiety / Stress
Anxiety or stress is almost always
associated with real life crimes of
violence. Deffenbacher (1983)
reviewed 21 studies and found that the
stress-performance relationship
followed an inverted-U function
proposed by the Yerkes Dodson
Curve (1908). This means that for
tasks of moderate complexity (such as
EWT), performances increases with
stress up to an optimal point where it
starts to decline.
Clifford and Scott (1978) found that
people who saw a film of a violent
attack remembered fewer of the 40
items of information about the event than a control group who saw a less stressful
version. As witnessing a real crime is probably more stressful than taking part in an
experiment, memory accuracy may well be even more affected in real life.
However, a study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) contradicts the importance of stress
in influencing eyewitness memory.
They showed that witnesses of a real life incident (a gun shooting outside a gun
shop in Canada) had remarkable accurate memories of a stressful event involving
weapons. A thief stole guns and money, but was shot six times and died.
The police interviewed witnesses, and thirteen of them were re-interviewed five
months later. Recall was found to be accurate, even after a long time, and two
misleading questions inserted by the research team had no effect on recall accuracy.
One weakness of this study was that the witnesses who experienced the highest
levels of stress where actually closer to the event, and this may have helped with the
accuracy of their memory recall.
The Yuille and Cutshall study illustrates two important points:
1. There are cases of real-life recall where memory for an anxious / stressful event is
accurate, even some months later.
2. Misleading questions need not have the same effect as has been found in
laboratory studies (e.g. Loftus & Palmer).
Reconstructive Memory
Bartlett ’s theory of reconstructive memory is crucial to an understanding of the
reliability of eyewitness testimony as he suggested that recall is subject to personal
interpretation dependent on our learnt or cultural norms and values, and the way we
make sense of our world.
Many people believe that memory works something like a videotape. Storing
information is like recording and remembering is like playing back what was
recorded. With information being retrieved in much the same form as it was
encoded. However, memory does not work in this way. It is a feature of human
memory that we do not store information exactly as it is presented to us. Rather,
people extract from information the gist, or underlying meaning.
In other words, people store information in the way that makes the most sense to
them. We make sense of information by trying to fit it into schemas, which are a
way of organizing information.
Schemas are mental 'units' of knowledge that correspond to frequently encountered
people, objects or situations. They allow us to make sense of what we encounter in
order that we can predict what is going to happen and what we should do in any
given situation. These schemas may, in part, be determined by social values and
therefore prejudice.
Schemas are therefore capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconsciously
‘unacceptable’ information in order to ‘fit in’ with our existing knowledge or
schemas. This can, therefore, result in unreliable eyewitness testimony.
Bartlett tested this theory using a variety of stories to illustrate that memory is an
active process and subject to individual interpretation or construction.
In his famous study 'War of the Ghosts', Bartlett (1932) showed that memory is not
just a factual recording of what has occurred, but that we make “effort after
meaning”. By this, Bartlett meant that we try to fit what we remember with what we
really know and understand about the world. As a result, we quite often change our
memories so they become more sensible to us.
His participants heard a story and had to tell the story to another person and so on,
like a game of “Chinese Whispers”.
The story was a North American folk tale called “The War of the Ghosts”. When
asked to recount the detail of the story, each person seemed to recall it in their own
individual way.
With repeating telling, the passages became shorter, puzzling ideas were
rationalized or omitted altogether and details changed to become more familiar or
conventional.
For example, the information about the ghosts was omitted as it was difficult to
explain, whilst participants frequently recalled the idea of “not going because he
hadn’t told his parents where he was going” because that situation was more familiar
to them. For this research Bartlett concluded that memory is not exact and is
distorted by existing schema, or what we already know about the world.
It seems, therefore, that each of us ‘reconstructs’ our memories to conform to our
personal beliefs about the world.
This clearly indicates that our memories are anything but reliable, ‘photographic’
records of events. They are individual recollections which have been shaped &
constructed according to our stereotypes, beliefs, expectations etc.
The implications of this can be seen even more clearly in a study by Allport &
Postman (1947).
When asked to recall details of the picture opposite, participants tended to report that
it was the black man who was holding the razor.
Clearly this is not correct and shows that memory is an active process and can be
changed to 'fit in' with what we expect to happen based on your knowledge and
understanding of society (e.g. our schemas).
Weapon Focus
This refers to an eyewitness’s concentration on a weapon to the exclusion of other
details of a crime. In a crime where a weapon is involved, it is not unusual for a
witness to be able to describe the weapon in much more detail than the person
holding it.
Loftus et al. (1987) showed participants a series of slides of a customer in a
restaurant. In one version the customer was holding a gun, in the other the same
customer held a checkbook. Participants who saw the gun version tended to focus
on the gun. As a result they were less likely to identify the customer in an identity
parade those who had seen the checkbook version
However, a study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) contradicts the importance of
weapon focus in influencing eyewitness memory.