whether leading questions can affect a person's memory of a question and insert an object that is not there into the memory.

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Nazma Akuji

Introduction

Memory is the minds ability to store information and use it. A single process has yet not been defined about it and several theories exist about its nature. It has a huge role on our everyday lives and can be categorised into two main parts: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory stores a limited amount of information for a period of a few seconds. It can also be referred to as the ‘primary’, ‘working’ or ‘active’ part of the memory. On the other hand, long-term memory is stored as meaning and can last from 30 seconds to time periods as long as decades.

The reliability of memory is often questioned. Memory is extremely malleable. Studies have shown that memories are often constructed after the fact has been told, and suggestions from others help fill the gaps. For example, if a police officer shows a witness a picture of an assailant and then shown a line-up of possible assailants, whether the witness is recalling the person they saw or the person in the picture is questionable.

Bartlett (1932) investigated the effect of schema on a participant’s recall of a story. A schema is a mental structure that represents some aspect of the world. They are used by people to organise current knowledge and is thought to provide a framework for future understanding. His theory of reconstructive memory is crucial to an understanding of eyewitness testimony because he says that the way we see our world and make sense of it affects our recall. To test this Bartlett conducted a study in which the participants were told stories from other cultures, which would be hard for them to understand. The story ‘War of the ghosts’ when recalled had changes in it to suit the western culture. For example ‘canoe’ was recalled as ‘boat’ and the concept of ghost was sometimes missed out altogether. Also the recollection of the story became shorter and shorter after multiple presentations. After about six presentations the story had been reduced from 330 words to 180 words. However, the intervals at which the story had to be recalled differed between the participants making the results less reliable. Demand characteristics such as participants acting according to the hypothesis after researching it, and behaving how they thought the experimenter wanted them to, resulted in lack of internal validity. The idea of schemas is very vague and schemas differ from person to person, therefore results cannot be generalised. On the other hand, Bartlett’s research into memory was revolutionary because he was the first person to suggest that memory was an active construction process.

An eyewitness is someone who has seen someone or something occurring and can recall and bear witness to it. It can be distorted via ‘conformation bias’, which occurs when what is remembered of an event is influenced by the observer’s expectations. There are factors which can affect the reliability of eyewitness testimony.

Context defines the surroundings in which the event happened is different from the surroundings in which the memory is recalled. Laboratory research on memory and specific research on eyewitness testimony has shown that a memory is better recalled if the person is in the same environment that the memory was encoded in.

Emotion and stress in studies by Clifford & Scott (1978) have shown that participants shown a violent film recalled less of the 40 items of information. The control group on the other hand were shown a less violent film and were found to recall more information. However, witnessing a real crime is more stressful than in a laboratory situation, therefore it would be harder to recall a memory from a real situation.

Due to much research in the role of age, it is generally believed that children are less reliable eyewitnesses than adults.

Racial and gender stereotypes can affect the recollection of a memory and eyewitness accounts often reflect commonly held stereotypes. Howitt (1991) studied the effect of racial stereotyping on memory for events. In this study, participants revealed distortions of a story told to them based on stereotypical racist assumptions.

A series of studies by Loftus et al (1974) showed that use of questions which are leading can affect the recall of a memory and things that did not occur can be inserted into a person’s memory and therefore distort it. Leading questions suggest answers that imply there is a proper answer.

Loftus drew on Bartlett’s ideas of reconstructive memory and how questioning after an event can effect the reliability of the information being recalled. Two similar experiments were conducted to test this.

Students shown seven films of traffic accidents gave highest speed estimate with the use of the word ‘smashed’  in the leading question and the word ‘contacted’  for the slowest estimate, showing people are poor judges of speed and affected by wording of a question. The second experiment was designed to test whether the wording caused the participant to recall the accident worse than it was or whether it was response-bias.

Students shown a film containing multiple car accidents were either asked the leading question using the word ‘hit’, ‘smashed’ or were not asked the question at all. A week later, the participants who were asked the leading question using the word ‘smashed’ had an increased likelihood of them answering ‘yes’ to seeing broken glass, when there was none actually present.

The studies show that leading questions can distort a memory recall. On the other hand, interference when encoding the memory or replacing of memory may also provoke distortion. Also, the experiments lack ecological validity because the participants were shown a film and not a real car crash, and the experiment was conducted in a laboratory increasing the chance of demand characteristics. A positive attribution is that it has influenced the way in which eyewitnesses are questioned.

The following study was also conducted by Loftus and Palmer (1974). The aim was to investigate the effect of leading questions on memory of events. Two groups of participants were shown a film of a car accident and asked the following questions: control group – ‘how fast was the white sports car going when it passed the stop sign?’ and experimental group - ‘how fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn whilst travelling along the country road?’ In the actual film there was a stop sign which the car passed, but there was no barn. 17% of the experimental group reported seeing a barn, whereas less than 3% of the control group made this mistake. A non-existent item has been inserted into the memory of the witnesses’ by asking a leading question.

The aim of the experiment is to find out whether leading questions can affect a person’s memory of a question and insert an object that is not there into the memory.

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Hypotheses

The experimental hypothesis is the leading question will make the participant recall an item that was not there, more often than the participants who were asked the non-leading question.

The null hypothesis is that the leading question will have no effect on the recollection of the picture, and the question will be answered correctly i.e. the object was not present in the picture.


Method

Design

The experiment was conducted as a field experiment due to the fact that Loftus’ study lacked ecological validity as it took place in laboratory settings. Conducting a field experiment ...

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