The Importance Of Memory Misconceptions

There are many misconceptions about memory that influences the strength of eye witness testimonies in court cases. Law enforcement officers, judges, and the general public believe that human memory works like a video camera so everything people remember must be true and accurate. If the person recalling the memory has high confidence in the accuracy of the memory, even if it were an adult recalling a childhood event, the memory is more likely to be believed as true. However, memory must be encoded and retrieved. During the retrieval process, there are factors that may influence the accuracy of the memory that is actually remembered. This causes problems in the legal system when an innocent person is falsely accused and punished solely on witness

In contrast to most of the expert opinions, judges and jurors usually believe that what the witness remembers is true especially if they are confident in the truth of the memory. Experts believe otherwise. Over time, memory consolidates during sleep and becomes hippocampal independent. Retrieving a memory causes a need for the memory to be reconsolidated. During this time, the memory can be distorted through misinformation or with the passage of time. For example, in Loftus and Palmer’s experiment, the memory of how fast the car was going was influenced by the wording of the question; “smashed” made people believe the cars were going much faster than “hit”. Although law enforcement officers do not intend to change a witness’ memory or implant a false memory, their actions may influence a change in how the memory is

This causes a memory bias to occur because people use a schemata during reconstruction. Many people have a bias of what should happen during a crime or who is more likely to commit a crime. Similar to falsely remembering books in a graduate student’s office, because that is what to be expected, these biases may impact the accuracy of a witness’ recalled memory. Cross-race bias is a memory bias. It is difficult to remember a face if they belong to a different race or ethnic background. Combined with misinformation that may occur during an investigation, the witness may misidentify a suspect during a line up and ultimately have an innocent person punished for a crime they didn’t commit, similar to the case seen in class. This is why the authors suggest the use of a sequential rather than a simultaneous line up. Howe (2013) focuses on childhood development of memory and why adult recollection of childhood events may be faulty. There are four main reasons why it is difficult to remember events from early childhood. The first reason is that a child’s semantic memory or memory for general facts and knowledge is not as developed. They do not understand certain concepts so they cannot encode those concepts into their