So I kind of combined an interest in legal issues with some expertise in human memory and produced this line of work. And so I thought, well I know something about memory but how about looking at the memory of witnesses to accidents, crimes and other legally relevant events. As a graduate student I'd done a little bit of work on human memory, and then once I got my PhD I wanted to do some work that had a more immediate practical application. Kaitlin Luna: And what got you interested in this work?Įlizabeth Loftus: Oh gosh, I got interested in studying memory distortion many decades ago. In all of these cases, the opportunity is there for new information, not necessarily accurate information, to contaminate a person's memory. People can be manipulated when they see media coverage about an event, let's say it's a high publicity event that is talked about a lot on television or newspapers. They can be manipulated when they are interrogated by an investigator who maybe has an agenda or has a hypothesis about what probably happened and communicates that to the witness even inadvertently. Kaitlin Luna: And how can human memories be manipulated?Įlizabeth Loftus: They can be manipulated when people talk to each other after let's say some crime is over that they may have both witnessed. But rather, new information, new ideas, new thoughts, suggestive information, misinformation can enter people's conscious awareness and cause a contamination, a distortion, an alteration in memory, and that's the kind of thing that I've been studying for the past many decades. So can you explain that a bit more?Įlizabeth Loftus: One of the things that I and other people who do similar work have shown is that once you have an experience and you record it in memory, it doesn't just stick there in some pristine form you know waiting to be played back like a recording device. Kaitlin Luna: So your research tells us something I would think is unsettling about our minds, that our memories aren't set in stone, that they're basically subject to manipulation. Kaitlin Luna: It's wonderful to have you here today. Loftus has been honored by APA's review of general psychology as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Loftus is well known for her research on human memory, notably false memories. Elizabeth Loftus, a distinguished professor at the University of California Irvine. As always we want to hear from you, so please email me at if you have any comments or ideas for us, that's joined by Dr. This episode is about how our memories may not be as reliable as we like to think. This podcast was recorded live during the 2018 APA convention in San Francisco. Kaitlin Luna: Hi, this is Kaitlin Luna, host of Speaking of Psychology.
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