Five myths about memory (and why they matter in court)

Reference: :Simons, D., & Chabris, C. (2011). What People Believe about How Memory Works: A Representative Survey of the U.S. Population PLoS ONE, 6 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022757

August 5th, 2011 by Ed Yong in Memory, Neuroscience and psychology, Select | 22 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

22 Responses to “Five myths about memory (and why they matter in court)”

1. Tom Hartley (@tom_hartley) Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 9:16 am

The conclusion that scientists should communicate their uncontroversial findings more vigorously is spot on.

Unfortunately it is hard for these established findings to gain space in the news agenda. But perhaps there is a place for bloggers such as yourself to explore the background and consensus in more detail.

The world’s largest ever memory conference is ending today in York. I would be happy to try to arrange a brief chat with one of the experts here, if you are interested in following up Simons and Chabris’ suggestion!

http://www.york.ac.uk/conferences/icom5/
2. nico Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 11:52 am

Although I agree your article makes the point that scientists should communicate their findings as widely as possible, in this case I think the onus is also on the legal profession.

It has been known for some time that memories are quite malleable, and in a system where testimonies can carry a lot of weight I would expect that the legal profession keeps an eye on the latest research (if they don’t already), and draws up guidelines accordingly.
3. Daniel Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 12:36 pm

Wow. So most people really think their brains are like video cameras and memories don’t change? That’s frightening. With the exception of the last slide, I would have expected the majority of the public to answer similarly to what the experts said. I’m going out on a limb here but I venture to guess that if this survey was done in a country other than the US, the outcome may be quite different. If these results are indeed representative of the US population, they also might help explain the faith and trust Americans have in a judicial system in which untrained lay people get to decide whether someone should be executed or face life in prison, which to me as a European is simply shocking.

P.S.: May I suggest to add a line to this box warning people that if they forget to fill out a required field, everything they wrote will be gone and it’s a good idea to select all and copy it before hitting the Submit button?
4. Brin Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 12:59 pm

it’s a good idea to select all and copy it before hitting the Submit button?

That’s always a good idea.
5. Jeremy Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 2:28 pm

What you can’t remember what you typed? : p
6. Boris Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 3:08 pm

Such findings need to get through to public. One can smile at what others believe to be true when it is not, but no one would like to be convicted of crimes one did not commit thanks to that belief. I’ve posted the findings in my blog in Russian.
7. Dan Simons Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 4:10 pm

Niko — many in the legal community are aware of the research. What they didn’t really know for certain is how pervasive some of these mistaken common-sense intuitions are. In some states (Louisiana, for example), expert testimony by memory researchers has been disallowed on the grounds that it’s not established enough or that it’s obvious. We’re hoping that this evidence from a representative sample helps to override those jurists’s intuitions about intuitions…
-Dan
8. Kari Kenefick Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 6:04 pm

A midwestern law school enlists a nonstudent to dash into a room full of first year law students, grab a purse or backpack and run off. The instructor then asks the class, 70-100 students, to write down a description of the “perp”. The results are amazingly far from accurate of the “perp’s” appearance. Innocence Projects around the US know that eyewitness testimony, even firsthand, is notoriously unreliable; memory is colored by the excitement (terror? surprise?) of certain events.
9. Harold Says:
August 5th, 2011 at 11:58 pm

The cynic might say that prosecutors don’t want jurors to know or understand these misconceptions about memory as it might make their jobs harder. It would certainly have changed the deliberations in 12 Angry Men, for example.

I remember reading in a similar article to take pictures of an event (mugging, car accident, etc.) if possible, and if not, to write down all you can as soon as possible and then defer to those notes. It’s all too easy to misremember details as time passes, not to mention the possibility of suggestive questioning altering your memory.
10. Dorothy Bishop Says:
August 6th, 2011 at 1:42 am

Readers interested in this topic will find this long-form blog about Beth Loftus by Will Saletan in Slate is astonishingly good
http://www.slate.com/id/2256089/
11. Andrew Wilson Says:
August 6th, 2011 at 4:50 am

I’m more worried about the percentage of experts not getting these right.
12. IW Says:
August 8th, 2011 at 6:31 am

I had a really good comment but memory fails me….
13. Brian Says:
August 8th, 2011 at 8:26 am

I’m not a psychologist, but I would guess one reason these myths persist is that articles about them do a poor job of presenting a better alternative. For example, if there were a wide misperception that Montreal is the capital of Canada, I wouldn’t try to correct that just by telling people Montreal is not the capital of Canada. I would tell them that Ottawa is the capital. If you tell them memory doesn’t work like a video camera but don’t give them an alternative analogy, then you shouldn’t be surprised if they keep thinking it works like a video camera.
14. PJ Says:
August 10th, 2011 at 1:53 am

Brian has a good point, but I’m not sure I can think of a better analogy.

Kind of like RAM, in that it fades if you don’t periodically refresh it (read it, and write it back out).

Also, every time you bring it into your working memory it gets changed slightly, and those changes get written back to the long-term storage.

It’s like vector-based graphics: Instead of storing an image pixel-by-pixel, you store instructions for making the image.

Fidelity isn’t usually important, so your brain only keeps the parts that it thinks are important. (Do most people know what “lossy compression” means?)

If you try to recall something that wasn’t completely stored, your brain tries to fill in the blanks with whatever makes the most sense. Then it incorporates the interpolated data into the memory, just as if it were part of the original. It’s difficult to tell whether any part of your own memory is something you experienced or something you made up. That strikes me as something people would find hard to swallow, no matter how many papers are published in reputable journals demonstrating it. And I can’t think of any other system that works like that.
15. AntonyIndia Says:
August 10th, 2011 at 9:48 am

Some people DO have a photographic memory: Kim Peek (the real Rainman) comes to mind;
so it is possible. How does this affect the “Scientific consensus” on this topic?
16. Bob Snyder Says:
August 10th, 2011 at 1:12 pm

@AntonyIndia, that is not scientific fact. Quite the contrary, it is highly debatable whether anybody has that type of memory or not. But even in the unlikely event that a handful of people do have photographic memories, the article was about the general public and the misconceptions they have about their own memories.
17. Jimmy Bones Says:
August 13th, 2011 at 9:52 pm

I’ve never studied psychology in my life and realise how inadequate our brains are at recalling events and other visual/aural etc. information and how it changes over time. I’ve experienced it personally many times and try to analyse it to give myself a good and healthy amount of self doubt (or at least remain somewhat critical of my own memories, be that general information or recalling events). I find it pretty crazy that some people trust there brains so much and really think that it’s important for people to maintain a good amount of humility.
18. badnicolez Says:
August 14th, 2011 at 2:23 pm

Wouldn’t even a “photographic” memory be just that: a series of snapshots (however accurate) vs. a video/movie-like recollection?

Perhaps a test using these questions should be given to potential jurors prior to serving on a case. If you fail, you cannot serve unless you acknowledge your utterly false assumptions about the accuracy of memories.
19. Iain Says:
August 14th, 2011 at 7:16 pm

People are stupid. Get that through your heads.
Your vision is not a camera. Not at all, the eye sees, but it doesn’t record, the brain does that, BUT the brain filters its information. Unlikely visual events are for the most part ignored. There was an experiment where something interesting was going on, a person in Gorilla suit sauntered onstage, took something non essential to the scene and moseyed off. 90% of the people didn’t notice the Gorilla! It was filtered out.
So your eyewitness is unreliable by definition, unless of course they have a video of the event. Which then makes it a video recording, not an eyewitness.
PJ the only way that human memory represents RAM is that it is random access.
20. floodmouse Says:
August 17th, 2011 at 2:09 pm

I just watched the “Nova” episode on memory on-line. They use the example of stage magicians Penn & Teller, who can distract the audience with hand motions to prevent them from noticing a movement off-center that would otherwise be very obvious. (Reminds me of Iain’s gorilla.) I think the researchers should have re-worded their survey question about hypnosis: Not “can” it improve memory, but “does it usually” improve memory? Hypnosis has mixed results depending on the subject and the situation. I personally believe hypnosis might sometimes improve memory, but it very often distorts memory instead. The wording of the questions might change the statistical results.
21. Glen Says:
August 18th, 2011 at 9:28 am

at least 90%, possibly more of all wrongful convictions involve witness identification.
If I’m evber on a jury, and it is a case involving any kind of sexual assault or involving a known weapon, as far as I am concerned, no DNA, no proof!!
22. Peter Says:
August 20th, 2011 at 10:52 am

Our peripheral vision is fuzzy at best; what light does fall on the fovea is then filtered by the brain and stored with “lossy compression”. We can completely, though unconsciously, ignore the gorilla. Upon uncertain recall, we re-evaluate the data,and store the changes as original. Hypnosis can help up remember things that never happened. (Alien abductions, for example.) I agree with Glen; eyewitness testimony would almost certainly not sway me. I find it amazing that I can remember anything at all!