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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.