Suggestibility and Human Memory

Suggestibility in human memory is considered as the phenomenon called the misinformation effect. The misinformation effect occurs when the misleading information influence a person’s memory of the witnessed event and change how that person describes that event later. Moreover, the misleading information in this effect is referred to as misleading postevent information (MPI) (Goldstein, 2008).

Loftus and her colleagues contribute a lot to the early studies of misinformation effect. In one of the classical misinformation experiments (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978), participants first saw a slide show of a car accident and one of the sildes depicted a car at a stop sign. Participants in the experimental group got the misleading information that the actually there was a yield sign in the silde inseated of a stop sign. The misleading information was given by asking questions about the event in the sildes, such as “Did another car pass the red Datsun when it was stopped at the yiled sign?”. Later, a memory test about the information shown in the sildes was given to the participants. ...