Memory Failures Humans Flashcards
Alan Alda took a test to see how frail human memory was.
For this experiment Alan walked through a park at his leisure to see all kinds of staged events. He saw people taking picnics walking and riding bicycles and all kinds of other activities in the park.
Photographers were going through the park taking pictures of all the events plus they took all kinds of staged pictures that Alan did not see at all. After the experiment was over with, they gave Alan a test on what he saw. Some were real events that he saw and some were fake pictures That he did not see at all.
After work when they were showing Alan all the pictures in the park they showed him fake ones along with real ones and then asked him if this really happen or not. Alan was wrong more than half the time. Many of the pictures that he said were real were completely faked behind his back yet he had vivid memories of seeing them when he was looking at the photograph in his hand. Alan was just totally amazed how his brain could be fooled so easily. This was on science nova.
IN THE HISTORY OF MEMORY STUDIES an important event occurred in 1902.1 In Berlin, a well-known criminologist named von Liszt was delivering a lecture when an argument broke out. One student stood up and shouted that he wanted to show how the topic was related to Christian ethics. Another got up and yelled that he would not put up with that. The first one replied that he had been insulted. A fight ensued and a gun was drawn. Professor von Liszt tried to separate the two when the gun went off. The rest of the students were aghast. But Professor von Liszt informed them that the event had been staged. He chose a group of the students to write down an exact account of what they had just seen. The next day, other students were instructed to write down what they recalled, others a week later. The results of these written reports were surprising and eye-opening. This was one of the first empirical studies of eyewitness testimony. Professor von Liszt broke down the sequence of events, which had been carefully planned in advance, into a number of stages. He then calculated how accurately the students reported the sequence, step by step. The most accurate accounts were in error in 26 percent of the details reported. Others were in error in as many as 80 percent.
2a
On October 4, 1992, an El-Al Boeing 707 cargo plane that had just taken off from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam lost power in two engines. The pilot tried to return to the airport but couldn’t make it. The plane crashed into an eleven-story apartment building in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmermeer. The four crew members and thirty-nine people in the building were killed. The crash was, understandably, the leading news story in the Netherlands for days. Ten months later, in August 1993, Dutch psychology professor Hans Crombag and two colleagues gave a survey to 193 university professors, staff, and students in the country. Among the questions was the following: “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?” In their responses 107 of those surveyed (55 percent) said yes, they had seen the film. Sometime later the researchers gave a similar survey with the same question to 93 law school students. In this instance, 62 (66 percent) of the respondents indicated that they had seen the film. There was just one problem. There was no film.
3a
