Reconstructive memory

1. Which shooting incident was of particular interest to Elizabeth Loftus in 2002?

• 1. The Washington DC Sniper

• 2. Sandy Hook Elementary School

• 3. Columbine High School

• The Dunblane massacre

Answer explanation

The Washington sniper was of interest to Loftus as many of the eye witnesses reported seeing a white van in the vicinity when the shooters van was blue. It turned out this was an example of the impact of post-event information, whereby the witness's memories had been contaminated by a piece of information about white van that had been circulated by the media.

1. Which of the following terms describes the outcome of the integration of post-event information into existing memory?

• 1. Misinformation Effect

• 2. Confabulation

• 3. Cotton Effect

• 4. Mandela Effect

Answer explanation

Loftus calls this the misinformation effect. The term confabulation is closely relates as it refers to the making up of information/details. The term Mandela Effect surfaced in 2010 and although some people have suggested this is evidence for so-called alternative realities, in fact it probably just another example of many people creating the same false memory by erroneously combining similar bits of information that they have heard about in the media. 

1. Which experimental design was used in Loftus and Palmer (1974)?

• 1. independent measures

• 2. repeated measures

• 3. matched pairs

• 4. correlational study

Answer explanation

4. Loftus and Palmer used an independent measures design as each group of 9 participants were only exposed to one of the five verbs. There were five sets of the questionnaire produced, all identical except for the one critical question where the participants were asked about how fast the cars were going when they smashed/bumped/collided/hit/connected with each other.

1. Which of the following verbs was not used in the critical question in Loftus and Palmer? 

• 1. struck

• 2. bumped

• 3. collided

• 4. connected

Answer explanation

There five verbs used in the critical question were the five levels of the independent variable. The only one that was not used in the study was ‘struck’.

1. Loftus and Palmer’s experiment 2 involved asking 150 participants whether they saw broken glass or not and found that this was much more likely in the ‘smashed’ group than the ‘hit’ group. The level of measurement of the data in this part of the study was...

• 1. nominal

• 2. ordinal

• 3. interval

• 4. ratio

Answer explanation

As the answers to this question are categorised into ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the level of measurement of the data is nominal data. Loftus and Palmer would have tallied up (counted ) the number of each response (yes or no)  resulting in percentage for each of the five levels of the independent variable.

In Loftus and Palmer’s (1974) second experiment, what was the time interval between the participants being shown the car accident film/answering the initial questionnaire and being asked whether they saw broken glass or not? 

• 1. one week

• 2. 24 hours

• 3. 15 minutes

• 4. two weeks

Answer explanation

4. To test this statement we need to know if the even card (8) has red on the back, if it doesn’t the rule has been broken. It doesn’t matter what colour the 3 card is on the back as the statement we are testing is not about odd numbers. Likewise, it does not matter what is on the back of the red card the statement said even cards must be red but did not say that red cards could also show odd numbers. This means the second card that has to be chosen to test the rule is the brown card because if it has an even number of the back, the rule has been broken.

Which of the following is not a limitation of Loftus and Palmer?

• 1. it is hard to apply this research to the real world

• 2. the study does not consider how the stress of seeing a real world accident might affect memory

• 3. the study only uses university students

• 4. people are notoriously bad at estimating speed

Answer explanation

Although you can criticise Loftus and Palmer for lack of ecological validity - watching an accident in a film under laboratory conditions is not the same as seeing a real accident, this does not mean the results lack applicability. Loftus’s work has had an immeasurable impact on the way people are interviewed by the police and the way in which the EWT is used as evidence in court and this is a strength of her work.

8. Which of the following is a similarity between Loftus and Palmer and Yuille and Cutshall?

• 1. both studies examined the impact of leading questions

• 2. both studies had high ecological validity

• 3. both studies had an independent variable

• 4. both studies are generalisable

Answer explanation

Both studies looked at the role of leading questions although the studies yielded very different results, demonstrating that emotion may have an important role to play in memory. Yuille and Cutshall’s study made use of a horrific real life incident meaning the study has high ecological validity. Neither study is especially generalisable though as Yuille and Cuthall's participants may only have had such reliable memories due to the life threatening nature of the incident, meaning the results may not transfer to other types of crime.

How much time had elapsed between  Yuille and Cutshall’s participants witnessing the crime and being interviewed as part of the research study?

• 1. four months

• 2. two weeks

• 3. one month

• 4. two months

Answer explanation

The correct answer is four months, much longer than the week in between Loftus and Palmer’s participants seeing the filmed accident and being asked about the broken glass. This may seem like a long time, and you might expect memory to have decayed considerably in this time, but in fact the witnesses memories remained surprisingly intact. This is another reason that Yuille and Cutshall has better ecological validity than other studies of EWT; it is often months or even years before witnesses are questioned in court, for example.