Thin Blue Line Analysis

In 1976, an innocent man named Randall Adams was convicted and imprisoned for the murder of officer Robert Wood, after the presumed killer David Harris gave a false statement against him. This case inspired the documentary, “Thin Blue Line” and led to widespread controversy about the investigation. The documentary features several interviews of individuals involved in the case and these interviews highlight many aspects of how human memory works. The interviews reflected different ways that errors in memory can occur, such as spreading activation’s role in source confusion and false memories, as well as the limitations of visual memory. Furthermore, the documentary also made apparent how strongly biases and opinions can shape our attitudes about experiences.
Spreading activation is the concept that when someone hears, sees, or thinks about a concept, nodes relating to that concept are activated and this activation then spreads to adjacent nodes. Activation is summed at intersecting nodes and if this summed activation of an intersection is above a certain threshold level, features of memory such as sentence verification will occur (Lecture 5, January 26th …show more content…
Studies done by Shepard (1967) and Standing et al (1970, 1973) have shown that our visual memory is very good overall, but is still poor for unimportant details, or when foils are similar (Lecture 6, January 31st 2017). In the case of the officer’s altered testimony from fur collar to bushy hair, the error in visual memory is likely to have occurred due to similarity between the foils of bushy hair and a fur collar. Another way that limitations in visual memory were reflected in her testimony was through her correct recall of features such as the color of the killer’s car, but inability to remember the license plate number despite its importance; memory for text is significantly worse than memory for