Elizabeth Loftus and Memory Studies

When we think about how the memory, it is very easy to be tempted to think that the brain works like a computer. Thus, the most intuitive thing is to believe that memories are actually information stored in the past that remains isolated from the rest of mental processes until we have to remember those experiences, knowledge or skills. However, we also know that memories often offer a distorted image of the past.

However... Are memories imperfect because they deteriorate with the simple passage of time, or is it that what we experience after having "memorized" that information modifies our memories? In other words, are our memories isolated from the rest of the metal processes that occur in our brain, or do they mix with them to the point of changing?

Which brings us to a third, more disturbing question: can false memories be created? An American psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus has dedicated several years of her life to researching this topic.

Elizabeth Loftus and cognitive psychology

When Elizabeth Loftus began her research career, the

cognitive psychology he was beginning to reveal new aspects of the workings of mental processes. Among them, of course, memory, one of the topics that generated the most interest as it was the basis of learning and even of people's identity.

However, in the judicial field there was another reason, much more pragmatic, why it was very convenient to investigate the study of memory: one had to determine to what extent the information given by the witnesses attending the trials, or by the victims themselves, was reliable. crimes. Loftus he focused on studying the possibility not only that the memories of these people could be false or totally modifiedBut it was other people who introduced false memories into them, even if it was on purpose.

The car experiment

In one of his most famous experiments, Loftus recruited a number of volunteers and showed them recordings in which vehicles could be seen colliding with each other. After this stage of the investigation, the psychologist found something very curious.

When the volunteers were asked to recall the content of the recordings, very specific phrases were used to tell them that they had to recall what they had seen. In the case of some people, the phrase she used contained the word "contacted", while in others this word was changed to the term "hit", "collided" or "smashed". The rest of the sentence was always the same for everyone, and only the word that described the collision action changed. The volunteers were asked to give their opinion about the speed at which the vehicles they had seen were going.

Although all the volunteers had seen the same thing, Elizabet Loftus noticed that the way in which they were asked to recall what appeared in the videos altered their memories. People who had been given instructions containing the words "contacted" and "hit" said that the vehicles were going at a speed lower, while this was significantly higher if the people with whom the terms "collided" and "collided" were used were asked. "smashed".

In other words, people's memories varied according to the degree of shock intensity suggested by the words used by the members of the research team. A single word could make volunteers conjure up slightly different scenes about what they had seen.

At the mall

Using the car crashing video experiment, Elizabeth Loftus provided evidence about how information given in the present can alter memories. However, his discoveries went further by showing that it is possible to "introduce" false memories into memory through suggestion.

This investigation was somewhat more complicated, since in order to carry it out it was necessary to have information about the lives of the volunteers. That is why Loftus colluded with friends or family of each of them.

In the first phase of the investigation, the volunteers were told, one by one, four anecdotes about their childhood. Three of these memories were real, and the explanations about these experiences had been constructed thanks to to the information that the volunteers' relatives had given Loftus, but one was false, totally made up. Specific, This fictitious anecdote was about how participants got lost in a shopping mall when they were little.

A few days later, the volunteers were interviewed again and asked if they remembered anything about the four stories that had been explained to them in the first part of the study. One in four people said they remembered something about what happened when they got lost at the mall. But furthermore, when they were told that one of the four stories was false and asked to guess which one of the they were pure fiction, five of the 24 people who participated failed to give the answer correct. With minimal effort from Elizabeth Loftus, a false memory had settled in his memory

The implications of these studies

Discoveries made by Elizabeth Loftus were a violent shock to justice systems around the world, essentially because they pointed out that memories can be distorted without our realizing it and that, therefore, the first-hand information given by witnesses and victims does not have to be reliable. This made the resource of supporting versions of what happened with material evidence to be considered as very necessary.