Using CogLab, complete the false memory experiment and create a report on the experiment. In your report, write a brief introduct

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False Memory Experiment: Evaluation Categories Your experimental results (percent recall) are divided into the following three main categories:

• Original List: The words appearing in the list

• Normal Distracter: The words not appearing in the list and also not related to the other words in the list

• Special Distracter: The words not appearing in the list but related to the other words in the original list

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False Memories Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is well known for her extensive research into eyewitness memory and false memories. In her words, “You fill in the holes every time you reconstruct an event in your own mind.” Let’s examine two of her experiments on false memory. Experiment 1 In this experiment, the participants were presented with a series of color slides that depicted successive stages in an accident involving a car and a pedestrian. The car was a red Datsun traveling along a side street toward an intersection. The participants were divided into two groups. During the presentation, Group 1 was shown a slide on which the car had stopped at a “stop” sign before hitting the pedestrian walking on the crosswalk. Group 2 was shown a slide on which the car passed a “yield” sign before hitting the pedestrian. Immediately after viewing the slides, the participants were asked several questions, one of which was critical to test their recall of the accident. The people in Group 1 were asked whether they saw another car passing the red Datsun when it stopped at the stop sign. The people in Group 2 were asked whether they saw another car passing the red Datsun when it stopped at the yield sign. After completing the questionnaire, the participants were given a break of one to two hours. During this break, they were asked to read an unrelated short story and answer questions based on the story. Pairs of slides of the accident were again shown to the participants, and they had to indicate which slide of each pair they had seen before. The critical pair was the slide depicting the Datsun near a stop sign and a nearly identical slide depicting the Datsun near a yield sign. Results indicated that when the question contained consistent information, 75 percent of the participants responded accurately. However, when the question contained misleading information, only 41 percent of the participants responded accurately. It was observed that in a condition where participants were making a guess, there was a 50 percent probability of them answering the question accurately; however, misleading questions drastically reduced their chances of accuracy. Source: Loftus, E. F. (1996). Eyewitness testimony: With a new preface. London: Harvard

University Press. Retrieved August 20, 2009, from http://www.softdevlabs.com/personal/Eyewitness_Testimony/Eyewitness_Testimony. html

Experiment 2 In this experiment, participants were asked to recall events that happened in their childhood or events about which they had heard from their parents, siblings, or relatives. The experiments took place in two phases. In Phase l, participants read a booklet containing four short stories about events from their childhood, provided by their parents, siblings, or other older relatives. Three events actually happened and the fourth event was false. The false event talked about how the participant had got lost in a mall when he or she was a child. The events were described in a single paragraph.

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The false event was constructed around outlets where the family shopped when the participant was about five years old, members of the family who usually went along on shopping trips, and kinds of stores that the participant was attracted to—special interest (after verifying that the participant had not got lost in a mall around the age of five years). Participants completed their booklets by reading what their relatives had recited about each of the four events and then writing what they remembered about each event. When the participants returned the booklets, they were called for two interviews to be held after an interval of one to two weeks. The participants were informed that they were being examined based on how much detail they could remember and how their memories were as compared to those of their relatives and parents. Twenty-five percent of the twenty-four participants recalled having been lost in a mall, and some participants even described the event in detail even though the event had never occurred in their childhood. Source: Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric

Annals, 25(12), 720–724.