Loftus: Memory on Trial

How a memory gets built, and what that does and does not license

A course on the thought of Elizabeth Loftus.

Psychology

What you will learn

• Describes the 1974 design and identifies exactly what was manipulated.
• Reports the speed estimates by verb and reads the gradient correctly.
• States the broken-glass result and says why the one-week delay matters.
• Explains what the misinformation effect is a claim about, and what it is not.
• Describes the implantation design and identifies the role of the relative's corroboration.
• Reports the mall-study rates and distinguishes the initial figure from the follow-up figure.
• States what separated true from false reports on average, and why that does not sort an individual case.
• Explains why 47% and 15% are answers to two different questions.

Course outline

1. The Verb That Changed the Crash — In 1974 Loftus and Palmer showed people films of traffic accidents and asked how fast the cars were going when they hit each other. For different groups they changed one word. The estimates moved by…
2. A Whole Event, Put In — With Jacqueline Pickrell I asked whether an entire childhood event that never happened could be suggested into a person's memory. Twenty-four people were given short accounts of three real childhood…
3. The Rate Belongs to the Question — Lawrence Patihis asked people whether they remembered seeing video footage of the plane crash in Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. No such footage exists. On a computer questionnaire a third of them…
4. What Confidence Was Telling You — Everyone was taught that a witness's confidence tells you nothing. John Wixted and Gary Wells show that this was a sound conclusion drawn from an era of bad procedure, and that under a properly run…
5. The Wars That Were Declared Over — In 2003 a former chair of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins announced that the memory wars were finished. Two very large malpractice settlements had just been paid in Illinois. A decade later Patihis and…

Works read in this course

• Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction (1974) — with John Palmer, in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior — the verb experiments, and the broken glass that was not in the film.
• Eyewitness Testimony (1979) — Harvard UP, reissued with a new preface in 1996 — the book that took the laboratory work into the courts.
• Creating False Memories (1997) — Scientific American — her own account of the lost-in-the-mall study and of the case histories that prompted it.
• Dispatch from the (un)civil memory wars (2004) — The Lancet — the settlements, and McHugh's claim that the wars were over.
• Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld and Loftus, Are the Memory Wars Over? (2014) — Psychological Science — whether the disagreement actually ended. It had not.

Terms introduced

the misinformation effect, memory implantation, recollective experience, pristine conditions

Part of the Simposeum course library.