Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction

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and dealing with certain situations that arise within the legal system, such as the issue of eyewitness testimonies and how reliable they are. Many of the early studies on memory (e.g. Bartlett, 1932) demonstrate how memories are not accurate records of our experiences, even though we would like to think so. Remembering is rather an active process involving trying to make sense of the world according to existing knowledge. This knowledge is, according to Bartlett, stored in schemas. The schemas, i.e. simplified mental representations of knowledge, influence memory to a great extent as they interfere with processing of knowledge and create distortions. Bartlett conducted a study where English participants were to serially reproduce a North American folk tale. The participants were unfamiliar with the style and content of the story, and thus it quickly changed to fit their ideas of the world - the story became shorter, more coherent, more conventional, and more clichéd. The ...

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of eyewitness testimonies. In spite of the criticism it is clear that schemas do play a role in retrieval, and so we decided to replicate the experiment of Loftus and Palmer with the aim of investigating whether schemas interfere with information processing.

Method

Design

The design was a laboratory experiment, which allows for control and establishment of a cause effect relationship between the independent and the dependent variable. The independent subject design used chosen to avoid order effects. The independent variable (IV) was the verb used, i.e. "hit" or "smash", and the dependent variable (DV) was the speed estimated by the 20 participants.

For demand characteristics ...

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