Can we Depend on Eye-witness accounts?

by fulltimestudent 7 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • fulltimestudent
    fulltimestudent

    A lot of trust is placed on human memory. Not just in legal cases and criminal trials, but also as evidence that certain things spoken of in the Bible are true, because eye-witnesses attest to seeing these events.

    But, could that trust be misplaced. Consider this research:

    False memories: The hidden side of our good memory

    Date:

    February 5, 2014

    Source:

    Basque Research

    Justice blindly trusts human memory. Every year throughout the world hundreds of thousands of court cases are heard based solely on the testimony of somebody who swears that they are reproducing exactly an event that they witnessed in a more or less not too distant past. Nevertheless, various recent studies in cognitive neuroscience indicate both the strengths and weaknesses in this ability of recall of the human brain.

    Memory is a cognitive process which is intrinsically linked to language. One of the fundamental tasks that the brain carries out when undertaking a linguistic activity -- holding a conversation, for example -- is the semantic process.

    On carrying out this task, the brain compares the words it hears with those that it recalls from previous events, in order to recognise them and to unravel their meaning. This semantic process is a fundamental task for enabling the storing of memories in our brain, helping us to recognise words and to memorise names and episodes in our mind. However, as everyone knows, this is not a process that functions 100% perfectly at times; a lack of precision that, on occasions, gives rise to the creation of false memories.

    Two pieces of research, recently published by Kepa Paz-Alonso at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) in theJournal of International Neuropsychological Society and Schizophrenia Research scientific journals, have shown that this semantic process linked to the subsequent recognition of such words amongst children as well as amongst adult schizophrenics, is less efficient than that produced in a normal adult brain. Moreover, both studies have shown that children are less prone to producing this type of false memory in their brains, and something similar occurs in patients with schizophrenia.

    One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that children do not have this semantic process as automated and developed as adults. That is, the adult brain, after making the same connections over and over again between various zones of the brain concerned with memory, has mechanised the process of semantically linking new information for its storage. Nonetheless, according to the results of Mr. Paz-Alonso's research, this process is more likely to generate false memories in the brain of an adult than in a child's brain.

    According to the researcher, "in reality, the same processes that produce these "false memories" amongst healthy adults are also responsible for their having better memory. Rather than a memory defect, this effect is an example of the price that we sometimes have to pay for the virtues or merits of our memory; the two sides of the same coin, and the study of both of which enables us to better understand how our memory works as well as the cerebral mechanisms on which it is based."

    In the case of the research amongst children, Mr. Paz-Alonso tested the capacity for memory of a group of 8-9 years-old children and a group of adults using functional magnetic resonance techniques. In the case of the group of persons suffering from schizophrenia, these were compared with adults without psychiatric disorders, using similar materials as in the study on children, although behavioural techniques were used in this case and the scanner was not employed.

    Story Source:

    The above story is based on materials provided by Basque Research. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

    Journal References:

    1. Pedro M. Paz-Alonso, Simona Ghetti, Ian Ramsay, Marjorie Solomon, Jong Yoon, Cameron S. Carter, J. Daniel Ragland. Semantic processes leading to true and false memory formation in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research, 2013; 147 (2-3): 320 DOI:10.1016/j.schres.2013.04.007
    2. Pedro M. Paz-Alonso, Pamela Gallego, Simona Ghetti. Age Differences in Hippocampus-Cortex Connectivity during True and False Memory Retrieval. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 2013; 19 (10): 1031 DOI:10.1017/S1355617713001069

    Cite This Page:

    Basque Research. "False memories: The hidden side of our good memory." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 February 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140205080015.htm>.

  • fulltimestudent
    fulltimestudent

    Your childhood memories are probably less accurate than you think

    Date: January 27, 2014

    Source: Taylor & Francis

    How much detail can you reliably recall in your childhood memories? Actually very little, according to a new study with profound implications for our legal system.

    Writing in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, three UK-based psychologists asked 127 people to recall four of their earliest childhood memories about which they were absolutely certain. They were also asked questions about specific details.

    When the results were analysed, the researchers found that participants were much more likely to remember some sorts of details than others. The 'what', 'where' and 'who' were commonly remembered. Other details -- what the participants were thinking at the time, the weather and their age -- were less likely to be recalled. The time of day the event took place or what they were wearing were even less likely to be recalled.

    This matters because in many cases of alleged child abuse, memories, often "quite remarkably overly specific" memories, are "the only evidence." The authors of the study, Christine Wells, Catriona M. Morrison and Martin A. Conway, warn that: "Jurors and other triers of fact often respond positively to overly specific memory evidence […] and in the UK at least, many convictions are made on the basis of this type of evidence. With sentences [for those found guilty] in years, sometimes a decade or more, the question of what adults can remember of childhood events that they claim to accurately recall is then critically important."

    Prosecutors often use the fact that their adult clients can recall very specific details of childhood events as "powerful evidence" that certain incidents occurred. But as Wells and her colleagues state: "There is no simple relationship between accuracy [of memories] and the details, of any type, that can be recalled."

    The authors conclude that "some confidence can be placed in the recall of the who, where, and what of a confidently remembered childhood event; other specific details are, however, less likely to be recalled." They suggest that what we might think of as detailed childhood memories are in fact our brains non-consciously 'filling in' "specific details that have not in fact been remembered."

    Wells and her colleagues are clear about the implications of their work: "Courts and other settings where memory is the evidence need to be made aware of what is typically recallable, what is rare and unusual, and what seems unlikely ever to be recalled."

    This new study gives those in the legal and caring professions a "normative profile" of adult accounts of childhood memories, to help them sort out childhood fact from adult fiction.

    Story Source:

    The above story is based on materials provided by Taylor & Francis. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

    Journal Reference:

    1. Christine Wells, Catriona M. Morrison, Martin A. Conway. Adult recollections of childhood memories: What details can be recalled? The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2013; 1 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2013.856451

    Cite This Page:

    Taylor & Francis. "Your childhood memories are probably less accurate than you think." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 27 January 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140127093027.htm>.

  • fulltimestudent
    fulltimestudent

    People with highly superior powers of recall also vulnerable to false memories

    Date: November 19, 2013

    Source:University of California - Irvine

    People who can accurately remember details of their daily lives going back decades are as susceptible as everyone else to forming fake memories, UC Irvine psychologists and neurobiologists have found.

    In a series of tests to determine how false information can manipulate memory formation, the researchers discovered that subjects with highly superior autobiographical memory logged scores similar to those of a control group of subjects with average memory.

    "Finding susceptibility to false memories even in people with very strong memory could be important for dissemination to people who are not memory experts. For example, it could help communicate how widespread our basic susceptibility to memory distortions is," said Lawrence Patihis, a graduate student in psychology & social behavior at UC Irvine. "This dissemination could help prevent false memories in the legal and clinical psychology fields, where contamination of memory has had particularly important consequences in the past."

    Patihis works in the research group of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who pioneered the study of false memories and their implications.

    Persons with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM, also known as hyperthymesia) -- which was first identified in 2006 by scientists at UC Irvine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory -- have the astounding ability to remember even trivial details from their distant past. This includes recalling daily activities of their life since mid-childhood with almost 100 percent accuracy.

    The lead researcher on the study, Patihis believes it's the first effort to test malleable reconstructive memory in HSAM individuals.

    Working with neurobiology and behavior graduate student Aurora LePort, Patihis asked 20 people with superior memory and 38 people with average memory to do word association exercises, recall details of photographs depicting a crime, and discuss their recollections of video footage of the United Flight 93 crash on 9/11. (Such footage does not exist.) These tasks incorporated misinformation in an attempt to manipulate what the subjects thought they had remembered.

    "While they really do have super-autobiographical memory, it can be as malleable as anybody else's, depending on whether misinformation was introduced and how it was processed," Patihis said. "It's a fascinating paradox. In the absence of misinformation, they have what appears to be almost perfect, detailed autobiographical memory, but they are vulnerable to distortions, as anyone else is."

    He noted that there are still many mysteries about people with highly superior autobiographical memory that need further investigation. LePort, for instance, is studying forgetting curves (which involve how many autobiographical details people can remember from one day ago, one week ago, one month ago, etc., and how the number of details decreases over time) in both HSAM and control participants and will employ functional MRI to better understand the phenomenon.

    "What I love about the study is how it communicates something that memory distortion researchers have suspected for some time: that perhaps no one is immune to memory distortion," Patihis said. "It will probably make some nonexperts realize, finally, that if even memory prodigies are susceptible, then they probably are too. This teachable moment is almost as important as the scientific merit of the study. It could help educate people -- including those who deal with memory evidence, such as clinical psychologists and legal professionals -- about false memories."

    The study appears this week in the early online version of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Story Source:

    The above story is based on materials provided by University of California - Irvine. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

    Journal Reference:

    1. L. Patihis, S. J. Frenda, A. K. R. LePort, N. Petersen, R. M. Nichols, C. E. L. Stark, J. L. McGaugh, E. F. Loftus. False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1314373110

    Cite This Page:

    University of California - Irvine. "People with highly superior powers of recall also vulnerable to false memories." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 19 November 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131119131438.htm>.

  • fulltimestudent
    fulltimestudent

    How we create false memories: Assessing memory performance in older adults

    Date: November 7, 2011

    Source: Association for Psychological Science

    A new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, published online October 26 addresses the influence of age-related stereotypes on memory performance and memory errors in older adults.

    Ayanna Thomas, assistant professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab at Tufts University, and co-author Stacey J. Dubois, a former graduate student at Tufts, set out to investigate how implicitly held negative stereotypes about aging could influence memory performance in older adults.

    Thomas and Dubois presented a group of older and younger adults with a list of semantically related words. A sample list participants would be presented with would be words associated with "sleep," such as "bed," "rest," "awake," "tired" and "night." Though the word "sleep" itself was not actually presented, both the older and younger adults falsely indicated that they thought it had been included in the list, older adults more so than younger adults.

    "Older adults are more likely to falsely recall these unrepresented words than younger adults. We investigated whether we could reduce this age-difference in false memory susceptibility by reducing the influence of negative stereotypes of aging," said Thomas.

    According to Thomas and Dubois, older adults may implicitly believe that their memory is impaired because of their age. To test this theory, Thomas and Dubois informed a certain group of participants (which included both older and younger adults) that their memory would be tested and that it was typical for older adults to do much more poorly on memory tests than younger adults. Another group of participants were told to identify words that had already been presented and the memory part of this test was deemphasized. Those participants were led to believe that this was more of a language based test than a memory test.

    Thomas and Dubois found that older adults who were told they would perform as well as younger adults were less likely to demonstrate false memory susceptibility than older adults who were informed about age differences in memory performance before testing.

    "This study is particularly relevant today as the population of older adults in the United States and around the world increases," said Thomas. "As medical science has progressed to combat biological illness, psychological science must also progress to combat cognitive deficits."

    Thomas plans to continue her research in finding ways to improve older adult memory performance when learning new information and retrieving information.

    Story Source:

    The above story is based on materials provided by Association for Psychological Science. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

    Journal Reference:

    1. Ayanna Thomas and Stacey J. Dubois. Reducing the Burden of Stereotype Threat Eliminates Age Differences in Memory Distortion. Psychological Science, 2011

    Cite This Page:

    Association for Psychological Science. "How we create false memories: Assessing memory performance in older adults." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 7 November 2011. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111104102129.htm>.

  • Phizzy
    Phizzy

    What fascianting, if slighlty disturbing, stuff ! Thanks for posting.

    I always maintain I have a good memory, compared to many folks, but have I really ?

  • Witness My Fury
    Witness My Fury

    Thanks, will look thru it properly later.

  • cofty
    cofty

    Marking

  • yadda yadda 2
    yadda yadda 2

    I recommend reading "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" by Richard Bauckham. Fascinating stuff.

Share this

Google+
Pinterest
Reddit