Kimberly Hodnett free essay sample

Kimberly Hodnett Shereer AP Psychology 8. Feb. 2018 Memory is studied as the power to encode, store and is also to recall information. In the replication of the Loftus and Palmer experiment we asked 20 participants to answer questions based off of language that we used to see if they would respond in a certain way. Our aim was to display that the leading questions could distort eyewitnesses previous accounts of an event. The questions were How fast were the cars going when they smashed, and how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? We found that when more people heard the word smashed they recalled that the cars were going a lot faster than the people that heard the word hit in their question. The design of our experiment as stated above was to see how participants would respond to certain questions.The student participants saw videos of traffic accidents and had to answer questions about the accident. We will write a custom essay sample on Kimberly Hodnett or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The test subjects were asked how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other. On other test subjects the question was worded differently by replacing the word smashed with hit. This was to test Elizabeth Loftus argument against eye witness statements that stated that under certain circumstances eye witness accounts are not applicable due to memory situations. In our experiment participant 11 heard smashed in their question and recalled that the driver was going about 65 miles per hour. Participant 1 was asked with the word hit and said the driver was only going about 55 miles per hour. After experimenting with a couple of other consenting participants we found the same correlation between participants that heard the word smashed concluded that the driver had been going significantly fast. Our test subjects were people selected at random so that it would not look like age and gender bias. In order to have strong results we wanted to make sure there was a variety of test participants. Choosing the students in our classes would have shown age biased simply because all of our group members were seniors. Above I mentioned that twenty participants we experimented on and they all ranged from freshman to sophomore (fourteen to eighteen years old). They were all students from Shawnee Mission North High School in the third lunch period and all the participants understood their part in the experiment. Each student though responded differently with side talk. For example, participant one was a student that recalled/saw the driver going 55 miles per hour. He kind of went on a tangent and kind of doubted himself and went back and forth with numbers. When finally coming to a conclusion thats when we recorded his data. One participant though on the other hand that was asked a question using the word smashed had been very confident in their answer and didnt contradict themselves. This experiment not only shows witness testimony issues but it also shows that using certain words can make participants and witnesses second guess themselves and their answers. With this being the case it shows that if the witness is not to confident in their answers they may alter their responses before answering questions and can also maybe forget vital information which goes to show witness testimony in lots of cases can be accidentally coerced in accidentally. Twenty participants, a youtube video and a laptop were the most important materials we used to conduc t the experiment. The participants were experimented on to show discrepancies in witness testimonies. We used a laptop to give them a visual aid and to show them the video. The video was used as the subject matter to conduct the experiment. The questions were also used to test and discover whether or not witness statements are useful and trustworthy. We identified a independent variable, and dependent variable but not a constant ultimately meaning there was nothing in the experiment that was identical to anything else. The independent variable the word changes in the question that we asked them. The dependent variable was the answers given by the participants when they were questioned over the speed of the vehicles. We only experimented on 20 students so our results we did not have a significant amount of results. When asked the questions some students recalled the car going faster when they heard the word smashed and when the students heard the word hit they recall the car going slower. This correlates with our experiment and goes to show that witness statements are not always reliable for various reasons. The person asking questions may ask a certain way wanting the witness to answer a certain way, or they could accidentally ask one way prompting the witness to answer a certain way. Statistically a detective is not going to ask that could alter the persons thinking or memories. The design of our experiment is to really focus on witness statements and test to see weather or not in the future if we can rely on these type of statements. Memory is a superficial and essential part of witness statements and if it corrupted in any way it can alter a whole case and change important factors of what really happened. This experiment was originally inspired and designed by Elizabeth Loftus and her significance in the research of memory is very collosal to future experiment and research. Individually I think this experiment correlates with other the constant concern for something needing to be changed in the questioning of witnesses. Conducting this experiment made lots of people take a different look on the way things are perceived when asked. Concluding I think with this experiment continuing to happen over and over again, I think they should really look into solving the issue. Many of the people we exported ow many cases and accident reports would be changed if questions and answers were said differently. This experiment itself has impacted science, research and the meaning of memory. Now we are able to look at things and maybe question certain answers from detectives. With this pressing issue in the back of our heads hopefully investigators will take into account how many times this test has been completed and what the outcome. This experiment has been replicated so many times that its possible officials have seen it but hopefully soon they will do something about it.