Human Memory : Malleable Memory

Eyewitness evidence has always been considering critical information when it comes to court trials and convictions. But how reliable are eyewitnesses? Scientific research has shown that eyewitness’s memories are often not accurate or reliable. Human memory is very malleable and is easily changed by suggestion. Relying on eyewitness evidence instead of scientific data often leads to wrongful convictions. Scientific evidence is much more reliable, and should be more important in court cases than eyewitness evidence.

2. Mastin, Luke. "The Human Memory - What It Is, How It Works and How It Can Go Wrong." The Human Memory - What It Is, How It Works and How It Can Go Wrong. The Human Memory.net, 2010. Web. 04 October 2015.

Eyewitness testimonies are based on a person’s ability to recall what took place accurately. Memory research has proven that a person’s memory is not a recording but it is reconstructive. Loftus and Palmer’s study set out to prove that the memory could be reconstructed through the use of language.

Memory is the process of encoding, storing and retrieving information in the brain. It plays an import role in our daily life. Without memory, we cannot reserve past experience, learn new things and plan for the future. Human memory is usually analogous to computer memory. While unlike computer memory, human memory is a cognitive system. It does not encode and store everything correctly as we want. As suggested by Zimbardo, Johnson and Weber (2006), human memory takes information and selectively converts it into meaningful patterns. When remembering, we reconstruct the incident as we think it was (p. 263). Sometimes our memory performance is incredibly accurate and reliable. But errors and mistakes are more commonly happen, because we do

An eyewitness can change the course of an investigation. However, how reliable that can be? People believe that we remember an event as exactly as it was, such as replaying the facts. Elizabeth Loftus is one of the leading researchers in the area of memory, and she found that memories are not accurately re-created. Reconstructing facts from our lives cannot be harmful, but it can be critical when deciding a criminal event. Loftus studies demonstrated that a simple wording question might change the eyewitness answer.

Instead they exist as fragments of information, stored in different parts of our brain. Over time, as the memories are retrieved, or we see news footage about the event or have conversations with others, the story can change as the mind recombines these bits of information and mistakenly stores them as memories.” The meaning of memory retrieval is simply refers to the subsequent re-accessing of events or information from the past, which have been previously encoded and stored in the brain. In common parlance, it is known as remembering.

Have you ever been a witness to a crime? Would you feel comfortable if prosecutors relied on your eye witness testimony alone for a conviction? According to “The Magic of the Mind”, eyewitness testimony which relies on the accuracy of human memory, has an enormous impact on the outcome of a trial. Eyewitness testimony is a legal term. During an eyewitness testimony, the witness usually goes into an account of the crime he or she has witnessed. This can include details of the crime or identification of perpetrators. Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory (simplypsychology.com). Eyewitness testimony can be affected by many psychological factors such as:

There are many different ways our memory might fail us. Encoding failure occurs when our brain fails to realize all the information around us and can only store what we are most focused on at the time. This causes people to lose information that could have beneficial because they didn’t focus on one single thing. This problem only gets worse with age. Storage decay can also affect the reliability of our memories. Even if the information does get encoded into memory, there is still a chance it could be forgotten over time. There is a forgetting curve that shows how quickly people can forget events. Another way our memories may be clouded could be by the misinformation effect. The misinformation effect can change the way people remember things. If people hear someone tell a story about an event that happened, they could take that information and believe it’s their own information they experienced first hand. These memory failures cause for controversy over whether or not eyewitness testimony should be used in court. These issues are enough to cause reasonable doubt when trying to convict a person off of an eyewitness account. I do believe their are ways for law enforcement agencies to avoid these issues to strengthen the reliability of their eyewitnesses’

Researcher Elizabeth Loftus, encapsulated the reliability of human memory and the notion about the inaccuracy of eyewitness accounts. She hypothesized that if eyewitnesses are asked questions with false presuppositions, the erroneous information will be incorporated into the witness’s memory and alter the memory of the witnessed event.

Have you ever heard of a person being convicted because of a witness testimony of events that didn’t actually happen? In many cases, a person is wrongly convicted because an eyewitness does not correctly remember what happened. In some situations, this is because the witness lied to authorities, but in other situations it is because of a false or modified memory. Memories are created all the time, but they are not always accurate. We conclude our past from information that we store in our brains, but we also create memories from what we have expected, seen, heard, or imagined.

Memory is a cognitive function of the brain that is often taken for granted. Memory may have many purposes, but most importantly it is essentially a record of an entire life span. From this perspective memory is the most important aspect of consciousness. Unfortunately, through formal experimentation it has been shown that memory is fairly inaccurate, inconsistent, and often influenced by our own experiences as well as the bias of others. Memory is not only affected during an observed event, but there are instances where memory can be influenced after an event as well. There are also instances where memory can be affected retroactively due to personal experiences and biases. Incorrectly recalling the memories of one’s life is usually not

There have been many innocent people wrongfully convicted due to eyewitness confessions in court. Eyewitness memory is one of the oldest forms of evidence used and has been a powerful evidence for judges. Although judges see this information credible, studies have shown that eyewitness memory is not reliable in courts and is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.

Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera”

Memory does not work like a video camera, smoothly recording every detail. Instead, memory is more of a constructive process. We remember the details that we find most important and relevant. Due to the reconstructive nature of memory, the assimilation of old and new information has the ability to cause vulnerable memories to become distorted. This is also known as the misinformation effect (Loftus, 1997). It is not uncommon for individuals to fill in memory gaps with what they assume they must have experienced. We not only distort memories for events that we have observed, but, we may also have false memories for events that never occurred at all. False memories are “often created by combing actual memories with suggestions received from

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.