It was found that with more time passed, less the participants could remember about the story, which resulted in their story becoming shorter and shorter as time passed. He also noticed that the stories became Anglo-sized, in area’s where the passage became abstract to their culture they replaced it with something they were assuming happened instead of the actually story it became more conventional since the experiences and traditions affected the details of the story. The participants were all men and the organization of the participants wasn’t always sync and on the right date. Bartlett gave very little specific instructions because he didn't want to influence the participants but this maybe would have lead to the story distortions, which he had observed were made because of guesses rather than from trying to remember.
Loftus and Palmer continued Bartlett’s findings to do their own experiment on reconstructive memory for eyewitness testimony. They had 45 students to investigate the accuracy on memory when a leading question is asked to eye witnessed, so the students were asked to watch 7 films of traffic accidents, then each one was given a questionnaire about those films. The question, “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” drew out higher estimates of speed than questions which used the verbs collided, bumped, conducted, or hit in place of smashed. On a retest one week later, those participants who received the verb smashed were more likely to say “yes” to the question, “Did you see any broken glass?”, even though broken glass was not present in the film. These results are consistent with the view that the questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one’s memory of that event. The controlled lab experiment is reported in which participants viewed a car accident and then answered questions about what they had seen in the film. The group given the word ‘smashed’ gave highest estimate than other groups and the group given ‘contacted’ estimated lowest speed. This study used only students which doesn’t apply for everyone because the younger the people the between the memory. Student’s memory is different to others because they use their memory everyday so Bartlett used a section of society who has good memory.
The second experiment they did also further suggested the idea that memory is easily distorted. They investigated if leading questions created a response bias or if they actually alter memory. 3 groups with one control group who didn’t receive any questions, the second group was asked the question with ‘smashed’ and the last group ‘hit’, then they asked the participants to come back after a week and asked that question with a different verb. Little people who said yes to shattered glass from the third and first group and from group two only 20% of them answered yes.
Since both experiment where in a lab, it can’t be generalized to real life, but since it was a controlled experiment it can be easily replicable, and also those results can be used in real life eye witnessing, and how to handle them so their memory is not distorted and can be as accurate as possible.
Yuille and Cutchall criticized Loftus and Palmer because they disagreed about whether schemas can or not be changed and because it lacked ecological validity. They didn't believe that there were specific schemas for verbs or that words could affect and distort memory. They conducted an experiment where they were allowed to used real life eye-witnesses and asked them questions about the crime. Their experiment was linked to schema theory because its about past experiences and memories, where it can be mixed with everyday things but schema theory as they tried to justify as having no concrete evidence/ It is not entirely clear on how we got or created schemas, there is no part of the brain which produces them, making it only a theory since it’s not specific enough.
To conclude there has been limitations which explain that there is not enough information and proof for the schema theory to make the experiments generalized to the whole of society but yet the experiments shows that schemas theory is to be taken into account when asking leading questions.
