Many innocent people are wrongly convicted of crimes every year, and many of these wrongful convictions are due to a mistaken identification during eyewitness testimony. In many criminal investigations, eyewitness identification can be a deciding factor in the case. The Innocence Project (2012) has exonerated 289 people in the U.S. based on DNA evidence. About 75% of those wrongfully imprisoned were people mistakenly identified in a line-up. (To learn more about the Innocence Project, click here.) Surprisingly, recent data have shown that approximately a third of witnesses for line-ups are children younger than 16 years old. The data also show that about a third of these children under 16 are likely to make a false identification of an innocent person as the culprit. It goes without saying that there can be very serious and severe outcomes for people as a result of false identification. For these reasons, research on eyewitness testimony has become more important and prominent in recent times. Read more…
Once a year, family and friends get together for a day full of camaraderie, nachos, wings, and beer, and some football. If you guessed that I am talking about the Super Bowl, you are correct. But, if you’re like me, it’s not the atmosphere or the football of this occasion that I look forward to most, it is the commercials. In fact, according to multiple sources, I am not the only one who feels this way about the Super Bowl. What studies have shown is that over half of the viewers watch the game for the commercials rather than the game itself. Read more…
Close your eyes and imagine every news story you’ve ever heard in your life. What do you picture? You probably remember the big events: 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc. The flashbulb memories; the ones you remember in perfect clarity to the point where you could even remember where you were and what you were doing when you found out about the event. You also remember these events in pictures, right? In all likelihood, you don’t remember the news anchor sitting there telling you about the day, or the words printed on a newspaper. You remember images of the event. Those are the ones that stick in your brain. Well what if those pictures cause people to falsely remember events in the news?
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With finals week fast approaching, are you starting to think about how you are going to study for your exams?
Well, Karpicke and Grimaldi (2012) argues, in their article, “Retrieval-Based Learning: A perspective for enhancing meaningful learning”, that retrieval is the best way to learn, and hence prepare for exams.
What is retrieval? Retrieval is the concept of active recalling of existing memory. Therefore, a retrieval-based learning/studying would require one to actively recall information repeatedly after going through the material once, as opposed to just reading through the material multiple times.
Learning is usually thought to be information that is inquired, understood, and stored in our memory, and sometimes the idea of applying this knowledge with pre-existing knowledge. Retrieval is very rarely known to be the key process in understanding and promoting learning. Retrieval is known to be a tool for assessing knowledge and a medium to test how much learning has taken place.
Karpicke and Grimaldi use several studies to demonstrate that retrieval of knowledge is actually a better way to learn and retain information. Below are two of the many studies to demonstrate this hypothesis, explained in a way that might be similar to how many of us study.
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“A good memory is needed once we have lied.”
– Pierre Corneille, Le Menteur
One of the most memorable moments of my childhood was saving my friends and siblings from a rabies-ridden raccoon. We were all playing a game of kickball in the local park, when a gargantuan raccoon approached us. With a crazed look in its eyes, the raccoon prowled towards us like a lion stalking its prey. I knew it was trouble, but before I could call for my parents, it began to charge us. As my friends turned to run away, I ran towards it. Like two warriors meeting on a battlefield, we raced headlong towards each other. Mere feet away the raccoon lunged for me, its fangs bared, ready to bite. As my foe tried to close its teeth around my calf, with only milliseconds to spare, my foot shot out and I delivered a ferocious kick to the raccoon’s chest. It roared as it thumped to the ground. Knowing it was no match for the stoic twelve-year old that I was, the raccoon raced away. My friends all crowded around me and celebrated my stunning triumph over the savage beast. I told that story to most of my friends at college, and few believed me. I knew it was true, so I reached out to a couple of friends who were there to have them back me up. What they said shocked me.
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Have you ever had a moment or event in your life that was so significant that even though it happened many years ago you are still able remember vivid details of that day? This type of memory is called a flashbulb memory. Many Americans have developed a flashbulb memory for September 11th, 2001 because it was such a shocking and significant event in their lives. Are you one of the many people who have a flashbulb memory of this day? Where were you when you first heard the news of the plane crash? What were you doing when you heard the news? These questions were adapted from questions asked in a study on flashbulb memories conducted by Bohn and Berntsen in 2007. If you can answer these questions, then you have a flashbulb memory. Congrats!
Flashbulb memories are an interesting topic for many reasons. Though people tend to be very confident in the validity of their flashbulb memories, the truth of the matter is these vivid memories are just as susceptible to alteration and degradation as normal memories. Flashbulb memories tend to include inaccurate details. But what if the quality of your memory could be altered simply by your mood? That is precisely what Bohn and Berntsen set out to test in their study. They tested the differences in your mood at the time of the event, affected your flashbulb memory.
For such a study, the experimenters needed a surprising and significant event that would have been experienced by many people. Bohn and Berntsend ended up choosing the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989 reuniting East and West Germany after being divided for 28 years! This single event had a great impact on the lives of Germans living on either side of the Wall. Thus it was a great event for the experiment!
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Say you’re home for the summer and decide to take a walk downtown. What are you doing as your walk? Where is your attention? Is it on the people who are waiting to cross the street or the ones who just stopped in front of a store window? Perhaps it’s on the little one begging his parents for ice cream a few yards ahead of you or the shiny red convertible that is just passing by. Is your attention focused on what stores you are passing or are you watching where you are going?
What about when you’re studying for an exam in the library? Is your attention actually on your notes or is it really on your phone as you wait for a text? Have you really focused all of your attention on that o-chem problem or is part of you laughing at the antics of the group at the next table? Maybe part of your attention focused on the loud group just walking through the doors while another part is on your facebook page.
In everyday life there are so many things going on around you. There are so many things that you are aware of that you don’t even realize are taking your attention like what street you’re on or what color the storefront behind you is. Did you know that studies have actually shown that people in urbanized environments are less able to focus on a single task? Or that they are more likely to be processing everything that is going on around them instead of focusing on a single object?
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We often forget many things in our lives. We forget where we left our keys as we’re running out the door in the morning; we forget what we had for breakfast; and sometimes we even forget what day it is. But one thing it seems we can always rely on is our ability to remember and discriminate between different faces. Our ability to recognize faces takes place without us even realizing it. It is something we take for granted because it is a very basic part of being a human being—recognizing the people in our world—our close family and friends who we see often, and even people we only encounter occasionally.
Because we are so good at recognizing faces, scientists have long wondered whether there are specific areas in the brain dedicated solely to facial recognition, or, rather, if there are more generic areas in the brain that recognize all things that we have a lot of experience with, and are in turn “experts” at (one such thing being faces).
But how do you even go about testing something like this? It may seem easy, but it is actually quite a challenging and intriguing dilemma. It may seem that all you would need to do would be to compare people’s ability to recognize faces with their ability to recognize other objects, but that would only answer half the question. A difference in ability doesn’t give any insight into whether there is a specific area or process in the brain specialized to just faces.
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Have you ever had a moment in which your mother forgot where she had put her phone, which she says she was just using it a minute ago? Or have you ever walked out of a store empty handed because you couldn’t remember precisely what it was that you were going to buy? I have.
Such forgetting occurs more frequently among older adults (60 -78yrs old) than among younger adults (17 – 27yrs old). In other words, older adults forget more often than younger adults. In addition, older adults are also more easily distracted. For example, when my dad once turned on a television while my grandma and I had a conversation, grandma got distracted by the show on television. She then forgot that she was in a conversation just a moment ago and started watching the show with my dad. At moments like this, I could not stop wondering why can’t my grandmother just ignore the television like I do.
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As I walk down Main Street in St. Paul, Minnesota, I see so many people who I assume I will never see again. As I turn the corner and enter a coffee shop, I recognize a person that I had passed by. I recognize the distinct facial features of this supposed stranger more than the hundreds of faces I have seen today. Facial recognition is critical to our lives as social human beings. In fact, we can recognize a face quickly due to our ability to process faces holistically. Holistic processing is when we process the entire face instead of looking at each separate facial feature. So was it that person’s attractive face that made me recognize them? People are attracted to all different types of people, so does attraction influence facial recognition? Perhaps sexual orientation plays a role in a person’s ability to recognize someone. One would think that heterosexual men and women would recognize the opposite sex better since they are attracted to them, but would that be the same for lesbians and gays? Read more…
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