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<\/a><\/p>\nEveryday the military are put into extremely stressful positions; they put their lives on the line and have to make life or death decisions. Due to the intensity and the stressfulness of the job, they must endure Survival School training in order to become eligible to be in front line positions. One such training is going through a mock prisoner of war (POW) camp. This camp is to see how they handle being captured and put under severe stress. It also tests their mental capacity of what they remember happened when put under these psychologically challenging situations.<\/p>\n
Morgan III, Southwick, Steffian, Hazlett and Loftus (2013) decided to study this training and see the effect of recently experienced and extremely high stress events on memory. They wanted to use the Survival School training to test their hypothesis because it would produce a more realistic nature of stress given the environment, and it would be much more realistic than if it was tested in a lab. This setting allowed them to test the real-world impact of misinformation in highly stressful events.<\/p>\n
The participants, all military personnel, were captured and put into a POW camp. After hours of being in the camp they were individually interrogated. The interrogation room was fully lit so the prisoner could see and hear the interrogator. They were required to face the interrogator, maintaining eye contact at all times. They also were kept lower then the interrogator, for example being made to bend or straighten his or her knees. If they did not comply with these orders or did not appear to answer the questions, they were physically confronted. The physical abuse they endured included facial slaps, abdominal punches, slamming the student into the wall and stress positions. After the interrogation they were put into isolation for 36 hours, where they were deprived of food, water and sleep.<\/b><\/p>\n
After the interrogation, the prisoners were exposed, as a group, to a propaganda speech. The speech was provocative and designed so the prisoners could experience situations of that has led prior prisoners people to give information to the enemy before. The whole POW camp was a long and intense process where the participants suffered repeated and persistent stressors. The captivity was modeled after direct experiences of military personnel who were POWs, making the experience very realistic and, therefore, extremely stressful. The stress that was experienced during the interrogation elicited intense changes in psychological and neurobiological indices, more than many real world threat-to-life events such as skydiving for the first time.<\/p>\n After the whole experience was over, all personnel went through memory tests to see the effect of misinformation and stress on their memory. The memory test was made up of three parts: descriptive characteristics of the interrogator, open-ended questions about objects in the room and photos of an eyewitness line-up of their potential interrogator. None of the actual interrogators were presented in the line-up.<\/p>\n To measure the impact of misinformation, they created four groups. One group was not misinformed and given no misleading questions in the memory test. The other three groups were all misinformed, but in different ways. One group was given misinformation in the memory test with misleading questions. Another group were exposed to misinformation when they were in isolation, in the form of a picture. The picture was an image of a person, but not of the interrogator. The last group was exposed to misinformation, after the propaganda speech, in the form of a video.<\/p>\n The findings from this study showed that all three groups who received the misinformation had significant increases in the amount of false memories compared to the no misinformation group. The most surprising and finding hardest to believe was the results from the misinformation group who saw the photo in isolation. The photo that they had seen previously was presented in the eyewitness line-up, and looked nothing like the interrogator (see Figure 1). However, 84% of the military personnel falsely identified the picture as their interrogator. There is a very clear difference between the two pictures, but after only 44 hours, the misinformation had produced a significant alteration to completely change the memory of the military personnel.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n