Elizabeth F. Loftus False Memory

1410 Words3 Pages

Andres Lima
Psychology 100
Project #1
05-02-2016
Elizabeth F. Loftus She was born Elizabeth Fishman in Bel Air, California, where she grew up alongside her parents and siblings. Her dad was in the U.S. Army while her mother was a librarian (Zagorski), whom tragically died when Loftus was only 14 years of age. It is thought that her mother could have committed suicide due to depression and it is implied that there was little communication with her father at the time if not for mathematics. She married another psychologist by the name of Geoffrey Loftus in 1968, only to divorce him in 1991 (Neimark). Ms. Loftus was one of the few women to stand out as a mathematical psychologist, despite what others may have thought.
Her love for psychology …show more content…

Loftus also studies false memories. False memories are referred to as memories that never happened or never existed. One of her well known studies enabled family members of a person to tell them vivid details of when the subject was lost in a shopping mall. She found that 25% of her subjects believed they were actually lost in a shopping mall at a young age because they believed the false stories of their family members, triggering a false memory. For other researchers, this has been referred to as the “lost in the mall” method. Along with her research of false memories, she has done research on rich false memories. These are memories in which participants’ experiences are expressed with complete confidence, numerous detail, and sometimes emotions, about an unreal actions. To illustrate, there was a study in which fake ads of Disneyland with Bugs Bunny were shown. Participants from this study were asked if they remembered having seen Bugs Bunny while on their visit to Disneyland. Some of the participants were convinced to have experienced some sort of action with the bunny, whether it was physical or verbal (qtd. in Award for… pg. 869). Most of us would probably recognize right away what was going on, but those who did not must have been in the moment. It is safe to say that the carrot eating character is at home in a hole

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