Calvin Willis Report

One October night in 1982, three young girls were sleeping alone in a Shreveport, Louisiana home when a man in cowboy boots broke into the house. He proceeded to rape the oldest girl, who was ten years old at the time, and then fled the scene. When police started to investigate the rape, the three girls all reported remembering the attack, and the attacker, in radically different ways. Crimes reports varied, one report stating that the victim had seen her attacker’s face, one reporting that she hadn’t, and one pronouncing that she had alleged that Calvin Willis, a cognitively impaired African American man who lived in the neighborhood, was the perpetrator despite little evidence and his proclamations of innocence. Willis was convicted by a

Humans are extremely limited in our abilities to observe and remember. Although there are certain methods we can use to remember things more efficiently, we are still severely lacking in our cognitive abilities to remember things perfectly. Some of the methods we can use are state dependence or combining information, however these are all liabilities as well as assets. State depending learning suggests that people are more likely to recall information if they return to the same physical and/or emotional state they were in when they learned it. Anderson discusses, for instance, that alcoholics, when drunk, may experience forgetting where they hid their alcohol when sober, and that when sober, have difficulty remembering where they drunkenly put their keys. State dependence would suggest that one might remember things easier when they return to the state they were in when they experienced the memory, and that retrieval is better accessed within a similar state as encoding. Sometimes state dependence can be used to access highly charged emotion memories like flashbulb memories. Although state dependence can be an effective method for retrieval, often the memories formed during an emotional state are not correct in comparison to the events that actually happened. Neisser argues that

Several of these altering environmental factors can be found within police interrogation and police line ups. Questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one’s memory of that event (Loftus & Palmer, 1974) and the choice of articles and verbs within certain questions can affect listener’s beliefs. Loftus and Palmer (1974) conducted experiments in which a total of 195 students viewed films of automobile accidents and then answered questions about events occurring in the films. The question, "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" elicited higher estimates of speed than questions which used the verbs collided, bumped, contacted, or hit in place of smashed. On a retest 1 week later, the subjects who received the verb smashed were more likely to make a bias or stereotypical judgment, and answer "yes" to the question, "Did you see any broken glass?", even though broken glass was not present in the film (Loftus & Palmer, 1974). Definite articles can imply the existence of a reference for a noun and cause participants to believe in the existence of said noun, even if the noun was not present during the incident (Loftus & Zanni, 1975). This is present cross-linguistically. Fausey and Boroditsky (2011) examined English and Spanish speakers ' descriptions of intentional and accidental events, and their memory for the agents of these events.