The Elizabeth Loftus Ted Talk was an extremely intriguing and informative speech which made me aware of the fact that memory is actually collated and shaped through the way it was perceived as well as the emotions that were involved when the event occurred. However, this talk mainly focused on how this feature of our memory created false memories and mislead judges to false convictions of many innocent people. This was most surprising, and even emotional to me as I thought that memory was just the humanly mechanism of recalling previous events and things in visual though I realized that I was mistaken like most people who are unaware of the constructive aspect of memory. However, I still interpret memory as a way of actively shaping events in the past rather than as a way of knowing.
In the BBC article it talks about the studies of, Elizabeth Loftus a professor of law at California University. In the article she talks about the importance of knowing how the mind can make presumptions and create false information on the premise of being told something. “We now … have hundreds of cases of wrongful convictions.” This goes to show how despite many people believing that they are right they will often be wrong and send someone completely different to jail. She describes an experiment where her student’s task was to convince their siblings they had been lost in a shopping mall at a young age. The studies showed that a ¼ of the siblings were fully convinced that such an incident had occurred to them. I found this interesting as to how without evidence people could be convinced without too much question. After such research, however, the criminal justice system has been changed since more studies have reported holes in memory tests. The incorporation of more than memory for accusations is now required. This means not only is memory of the incident required, but also evidence that truly indicates the person is responsible and whether he or she is being falsely accused of such a violation of law.
Response on eyewitness test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-SBTRLoPuo The video was of a false rape conviction that was backed-up almost independently by the witness of the victim. The victim Jennifer Thompson was asked to identify the rapists from a few pictures. Ronald Cotton who did look similar to Jennifer`s identification of the rapist. It turned out that another man Bobby Pool was the real suspect. However even after Cotton showed Jennifer, Bobby Pool, she was unable to identify him as the rapist. The only evidence that did set Cotton free was DNA evidence after 11 years.
This case, and many other similar cases that are coming to light, shows how fragile human memory is. The most bizarre part of memory is that it can be effected drastically due to outside forces after the event. I believe that humans are good at getting the broad idea, thus sometimes makes stereo-typical conclusions, and that it is not like a picture. It has a certain degree of error and with mental/physical stress can be modified. In this case Jennifer was shown multiple pictures at once and was told "the suspect may or may not be in here" However as of a understandable belief that the police would have already found the man and it is my responsibility to identify the criminal, she studies each one and chose the closest thing to her real memory. However at the point she chose the picture, her memory of the rapist has been slightly modified to Ronald Cotton`s face. The false memory became more and more secure in Jennifer`s mind as it was positively reinforced with the body pic-up and the conviction and even though she saw the real rapist later on, her memory was so completely modified that she could not identify him as the criminal.
I believe that this shows that it is not the memory its self that is faulty, but the human mind that surrounds the memory. In the video it is said that people have huge difficulty identifying a suspect to not be in the options. It also says that if people take more than 15~20 to identify a suspect it is most likely that a different process is going on other than facial recognition memory. I feel that if a young child or an infant were to identify someone, they would have a much better chance of identifying he/she since there are no emotions that would pressure them to think "he/she must be in there"
Although experts know of this, it is still very difficult as a human society to ignore a memory statement. I find that very interesting because regardless of this case, we know that memory is not the most accurate or reliable data source in the world. I think people still rely on memory because the memory itself is accurate and also because it captures things that the senses cannot catch. It catches the emotions, the tension, the mood of the situation and that is also a vital part of the human society.
This article generally talked about how unreliable our memory is, using a situation where people in the UK and Sweden were asked if they had CCTV footage of the bus bombing in the city’s Tavistock Square to test the accuracy of our memory. What was most surprising about this article was that many people claimed that they had seen the CCTV footage, while in fact there wasn't any footage at all. This was a very interesting article to read as originally, I did not think about how memories were created, and because of that thought that it wasn't affected by our own creativity. It also explained that while 2 people may have been involved in the same event, they might have different interpretations of it from each other because of false memories, especially when we believe in what we remember, making us think our false memories are actually the truth.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/law_in_action/7458536.stm I found this article to be very intriguing. The article's title is "Can you trust your memory", this article questions how trustworthy our memory is. A witness's memories are extremely crucial and beneficial to the law, however this article tells us that memory is more capable of making mistakes than we believe. Scientists take a look at how unreliable human memory can be. Faulty memory creates risks for justice, as because of this has become responsible for innocent people being implicated for crimes they did not commit. Professor lofts from the University of California says it is easy to convince people that they remember something that never happened. A simple experiment was conducted, students were told to try and convince their younger siblings that when they were little they had been lost in a shopping mall. A quarter of the participants recalled an incident as if it actually happened. This shows us that false memories are easily placed into the human mind and can be manipulated with ease.
I found this video very interesting. Lesley Stahl reported on flaws in eyewitness testimony that are at the heart of the DNA exonerations of falsely convicted people like Ronald Cotton, who has now forgiven his accuser, Jennifer Thompson. I found it fascinating how Jennifer could accuse an innocent young man after providing the police a very certain face recognition of her rapist. This shows that human's memory is faulty. It can be affected by the person's feeling and other factors outside the incident.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/law_in_action/7458536.stm This is a excellent example of the controversy surrounding memory as a way of knowing. There is no physical evidense to show that these crimes have taken place, yet people have trusted the recollection of others in making decisions on the outcome of a case. It is quite unnerving to think that how we recall things can be distorted depending on the situation and the prompts given. This leads to the question whether peoples memories can be used as valid evidence in a court of law. However, majority of the time there is no other physical proof ie cctv footage and so this is the only thing to go on.
In the article, Elizabeth Loftus, a processor of law at the university of California, Irvin suggests that it is enormously easy to convince people that never happened. She conducted one experiment which is she asked her students to help convince their siblings that when they were little they had been lost in a shopping mall. The result showed that around 25% of the examinees were implanted false memory. I found the results interesting since I personally believed that memory is not flexible and a method to recall knowledge acquired by other ways of knowing. However, this statistical result showed people can be convinced with out any evidences.
Resource: http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory.html
ReplyDeleteThe Elizabeth Loftus Ted Talk was an extremely intriguing and informative speech which made me aware of the fact that memory is actually collated and shaped through the way it was perceived as well as the emotions that were involved when the event occurred. However, this talk mainly focused on how this feature of our memory created false memories and mislead judges to false convictions of many innocent people. This was most surprising, and even emotional to me as I thought that memory was just the humanly mechanism of recalling previous events and things in visual though I realized that I was mistaken like most people who are unaware of the constructive aspect of memory. However, I still interpret memory as a way of actively shaping events in the past rather than as a way of knowing.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/law_in_action/7458536.stm
ReplyDeleteIn the BBC article it talks about the studies of, Elizabeth Loftus a professor of law at California University. In the article she talks about the importance of knowing how the mind can make presumptions and create false information on the premise of being told something. “We now … have hundreds of cases of wrongful convictions.” This goes to show how despite many people believing that they are right they will often be wrong and send someone completely different to jail. She describes an experiment where her student’s task was to convince their siblings they had been lost in a shopping mall at a young age. The studies showed that a ¼ of the siblings were fully convinced that such an incident had occurred to them. I found this interesting as to how without evidence people could be convinced without too much question. After such research, however, the criminal justice system has been changed since more studies have reported holes in memory tests. The incorporation of more than memory for accusations is now required. This means not only is memory of the incident required, but also evidence that truly indicates the person is responsible and whether he or she is being falsely accused of such a violation of law.
Response on eyewitness test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-SBTRLoPuo
ReplyDeleteThe video was of a false rape conviction that was backed-up almost independently by the witness of the victim. The victim Jennifer Thompson was asked to identify the rapists from a few pictures. Ronald Cotton who did look similar to Jennifer`s identification of the rapist. It turned out that another man Bobby Pool was the real suspect. However even after Cotton showed Jennifer, Bobby Pool, she was unable to identify him as the rapist. The only evidence that did set Cotton free was DNA evidence after 11 years.
This case, and many other similar cases that are coming to light, shows how fragile human memory is. The most bizarre part of memory is that it can be effected drastically due to outside forces after the event. I believe that humans are good at getting the broad idea, thus sometimes makes stereo-typical conclusions, and that it is not like a picture. It has a certain degree of error and with mental/physical stress can be modified. In this case Jennifer was shown multiple pictures at once and was told "the suspect may or may not be in here" However as of a understandable belief that the police would have already found the man and it is my responsibility to identify the criminal, she studies each one and chose the closest thing to her real memory. However at the point she chose the picture, her memory of the rapist has been slightly modified to Ronald Cotton`s face. The false memory became more and more secure in Jennifer`s mind as it was positively reinforced with the body pic-up and the conviction and even though she saw the real rapist later on, her memory was so completely modified that she could not identify him as the criminal.
I believe that this shows that it is not the memory its self that is faulty, but the human mind that surrounds the memory. In the video it is said that people have huge difficulty identifying a suspect to not be in the options. It also says that if people take more than 15~20 to identify a suspect it is most likely that a different process is going on other than facial recognition memory. I feel that if a young child or an infant were to identify someone, they would have a much better chance of identifying he/she since there are no emotions that would pressure them to think "he/she must be in there"
Although experts know of this, it is still very difficult as a human society to ignore a memory statement. I find that very interesting because regardless of this case, we know that memory is not the most accurate or reliable data source in the world. I think people still rely on memory because the memory itself is accurate and also because it captures things that the senses cannot catch. It catches the emotions, the tension, the mood of the situation and that is also a vital part of the human society.
Source:http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/study-shows-memory-surprisingly-unreliable/
ReplyDeleteThis article generally talked about how unreliable our memory is, using a situation where people in the UK and Sweden were asked if they had CCTV footage of the bus bombing in the city’s Tavistock Square to test the accuracy of our memory. What was most surprising about this article was that many people claimed that they had seen the CCTV footage, while in fact there wasn't any footage at all. This was a very interesting article to read as originally, I did not think about how memories were created, and because of that thought that it wasn't affected by our own creativity. It also explained that while 2 people may have been involved in the same event, they might have different interpretations of it from each other because of false memories, especially when we believe in what we remember, making us think our false memories are actually the truth.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/law_in_action/7458536.stm
ReplyDeleteI found this article to be very intriguing. The article's title is "Can you trust your memory", this article questions how trustworthy our memory is. A witness's memories are extremely crucial and beneficial to the law, however this article tells us that memory is more capable of making mistakes than we believe. Scientists take a look at how unreliable human memory can be. Faulty memory creates risks for justice, as because of this has become responsible for innocent people being implicated for crimes they did not commit. Professor lofts from the University of California says it is easy to convince people that they remember something that never happened. A simple experiment was conducted, students were told to try and convince their younger siblings that when they were little they had been lost in a shopping mall. A quarter of the participants recalled an incident as if it actually happened. This shows us that false memories are easily placed into the human mind and can be manipulated with ease.
Resource: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-SBTRLoPuo
ReplyDeleteI found this video very interesting. Lesley Stahl reported on flaws in eyewitness testimony that are at the heart of the DNA exonerations of falsely convicted people like Ronald Cotton, who has now forgiven his accuser, Jennifer Thompson. I found it fascinating how Jennifer could accuse an innocent young man after providing the police a very certain face recognition of her rapist. This shows that human's memory is faulty. It can be affected by the person's feeling and other factors outside the incident.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/law_in_action/7458536.stm
ReplyDeleteThis is a excellent example of the controversy surrounding memory as a way of knowing. There is no physical evidense to show that these crimes have taken place, yet people have trusted the recollection of others in making decisions on the outcome of a case. It is quite unnerving to think that how we recall things can be distorted depending on the situation and the prompts given. This leads to the question whether peoples memories can be used as valid evidence in a court of law. However, majority of the time there is no other physical proof ie cctv footage and so this is the only thing to go on.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/law_in_action/7458536.stm
ReplyDeleteIn the article, Elizabeth Loftus, a processor of law at the university of California, Irvin suggests that it is enormously easy to convince people that never happened. She conducted one experiment which is she asked her students to help convince their siblings that when they were little they had been lost in a shopping mall. The result showed that around 25% of the examinees were implanted false memory. I found the results interesting since I personally believed that memory is not flexible and a method to recall knowledge acquired by other ways of knowing. However, this statistical result showed people can be convinced with out any evidences.