Elizabeth Loftus

One of the principals that define the cognitive level of analysis is humans are information processors, and mental processes guide our behavior. Elizabeth Loftus was concerned with how information following an event can affect an eyewitness’s account of an event. She was mainly researching the impact of how questions are worded and why leading questions can “reshape” or change the way we remember a certain event. Her theory was that she could alter a person’s memory of an event by simply presenting it to the participant carefully. Loftus and Palmer (1974) tested the way the wording of questions and information subsequent to a certain event can change the way someone remembers it with a video and a leading, carefully worded questions. Loftus…

3. Historical Influences There were many important people that influenced Elizabeth Loftus in establishing her career. Richard Atkinson helped her in completing her master’s thesis on learning spelling via computer-assisted mathematics instruction. Her doctoral thesis on the other hand was supervised by Patrick Suppes. These men were both very inspirational to her. While she was in graduate school, two faculty members were also outstanding mentors to her; these men being Gordon Bower, and…

accounts of rape and received a life sentence plus fifty-four years in prison. Elizabeth Thompson, the female victim who identified Cotton as the attacker, provided a compelling and confident testimony during the trial and definitely impacted the juror’s decision in ruling Cotton as guilty. Though, in actuality, Cotton was one-hundred…

Elizabeth Loftus is a well recognized psychologist. Elizabeth is known for her eyewitness memory, and the different ways it can change (Hockenbury, Nolan, Hockenbury, 2016). Loftus collaborated with several other colleagues on many studies dealing with memory and memory distortion. Loftus then continued on in her research to find that source confusion on memories, lead to false memories. False memories are the distorted or fabricated recollection of something that did not actually happen…

Elizabeth Loftus is a very famous psychologist that was born in Los Angeles, California on October 16, 1944. Even though she is mainly known as Elizabeth Loftus, she was actually born as Elizabeth Fishman and grew up in Bel Air, California. Sidney and Rebecca Fishman were her parents name and her father was a doctor and her mother was a librarian. Elizabeth’s mom passed away due to her drowning and Elizabeth was just 14 years old, which had a dramatic affect on her life (Neimark, 1996). In 1968,…

Although seen as controversial, Elizabeth Loftus is a strong leader in psychology, specifically in the field of memory. Her discoveries and experiments with false memories and eyewitness testimony have made her very prominent. She has written about her research on faulty memories, explaining the impact it can have on justice and society, as well as individuals. Loftus is most interested in the implications false memories have in the justice system. There have been many wrongful convictions…

ago on TED called “Elizabeth Loftus: How reliable is your memory? (2003).” Loftus is a psychologist who studies memories. She studies false memories and false memory is when a person is very susceptible to a suggestion which can create a memory of events that never really happened. I think most people can relate to having a false memory, I know I can but, Loftus goes more in-depth with her findings on false memory and shows you just how detrimental your memory is. Loftus worked on a case for a…

Memory is the mental process of acquiring, retaining and then retrieving information and mental storage system that enables these processes. Misinformation effect refers to memory for false information or alteration of facts that leads to memory distortion. It occurs when episodic memory information is distorted or accuracy decreases because of post-event information occurring after the main event. Elizabeth Loftus started research in this field in 1974 where she found that wording of questions…

After watching How reliable is your memory? by Elizabeth Loftus, I believe that to a great extent, memory is not a reliable source of knowledge because it can be distorted, contaminated, and even falsely imagined. Memory decay, distorted memory, hindsight bias, consistency bias, the availability heuristic bias and suggestibility- are all problems that beset our reliance on memory.“I was there. I saw it.” The phrase that many witnesses confidently use in courts of law- to generally support or…

Studies on the formation of false memories have shown that through retroactive interference, you can alter an individual’s memory by giving them false information. Retroactive interference happens when there is an occurrence after an experience that affects the way you remember that experience. Consequently, this means that if an individual is given false information about a memory, it may mislead them to believe that they have experienced a certain event or occasion when in fact, they have not.…