Elizabeth Loftus: Cognitive Psychology And Human Memory

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Elizabeth Loftus was famous for contributing in the fields of cognitive psychology and human memory. Elizabeth has become a leading psychologist in the study of memory. Her experiments revealed how our memories change by the things we are told about. Our memories can be molded and how we can make ourselves believe false memories and then as time goes on they become more and more real. False memories are actually what she is most famous for. Elizabeth was born in Los Angeles on October 16th, 1944. Elizabeth’s father was a U.S army physician and her mother was a librarian. When she was fourteen her mother drowned and which affected Elizabeth very much. Her childhood was rough as her house got burnt down too. Elizabeth’s parents were Sidney …show more content…

She later began to questioning herself if that’s what she really wanted to be studying a few years later after receiving her Ph.D. and continuing with semantic memory. Elizabeth even got an opportunity at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Where she studied semantic memory. In 1974, she was granted permission to study memory depression. She went on to find that changing just on word in a question could distort a witnesses’ recollection of the situation. Eyewitness testimony can be altered by the information that is given to the person. This also lead to the misinformation effect which resulted in that memory was highly malleable and very open to suggestions. Misinformation effect went on to be very influential and highly known in the psychology world. One of Elizabeth’s famous studies was the Lost in the Shopping Mall study. In this study teenagers and children were programed to remember where they had been lost in the mall as children. The events that they programed them to remember were not true but after asking questions of the incident many had vibrant memories. This shows that people can confuse real life events to dreams events. This study also showed that a person’s earliest memory cannot date back before the age of three years …show more content…

In 1975 she was the first Washington State’s first expert in eyewitness testimony after a lawyer had read her article about a murder trail she had gotten to observe. Elizabeth then worked at the University of Washington, where she had worked for nearly 30 years but was dissatisfied. Elizabeth later became a notable professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior and the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine (Irvine, CA). Her work however has not gone uncriticized. Elizabeth has had to defend her work and has gotten into long debates over her work. She doesn’t hate it she appreciates it as it gives more knowledge. Her enemies as she likes to call them are always trying to find holes in her studies. For example, in her Lost in the Mall study when they study is finished they must debrief the subjects and after that there is no contact. If there happened to be and they still see that the person still believes they were actually lost in the mall that would be a big

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