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E F Loftus

Publications and source records attributed to E F Loftus.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1993

The reality of repressed memories.

Repression is one of the most haunting concepts in psychology. Something shocking happens, and the mind pushes it into some inaccessible corner of the unconscious. Later, the memory may emerge into consciousness. Repression is one of the foundation stones on which the structure of psychoanalysis rests. Recently there has been a rise in reported memories of childhood sexual abuse that were allegedly repressed for many years. With recent changes in legislation, people with recently unearthed memories are suing alleged perpetrators for events that happened 20, 30, even 40 or more years earlier. These new developments give rise to a number of questions: (a) How common is it for memories of child abuse to be repressed? (b) How are jurors and judges likely to react to these repressed memory claims? (c) When the memories surface, what are they like? and (d) How authentic are the memories?

Child↗
PubMed1993

Psychologists in the eyewitness world.

Over the past century, but especially over the past 20 years, psychological studies of eyewitness identification have been accumulating. Wells (1993, this issue) believes that the time is ripe to summarize the research on identification procedures, such as lineups and showups, that will minimize false identifications of innocent people and maximize accurate identifications of the guilty. Other experts in the field worry that there is still too big a leap from the laboratory work to the real world of crime. Identification research, many agree, has the potential for being one of the more useful arenas in which psychological science can make a difference in society.

Criminal Law↗
PubMed1993

Desperately seeking memories of the first few years of childhood: the reality of early memories.

How far back into their childhoods can people remember? Previous research suggests that people's earliest memories date back to the ages of 3 or 4 years. J. A. Usher and U. Neisser (1993, this issue) reported that some events, like the birth of a sibling and a planned hospitalization, can be readily remembered if they occurred at age 2. However, the bits and pieces of such memories that were obtained in their research may not be indicative of genuine episodic memory. An alternative hypothesis is that these apparent memories are the result of educated guesses, general knowledge of what must have been, or external information acquired after the age of 2.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Is the unconscious smart or dumb?

How sophisticated is unconscious cognition? This is one of the most fundamental questions about the unconscious that has been posed by research psychologists over the past century. Anthony Greenwald takes a contemporary look at this classical problem and concludes that unconscious cognition is severely limited in its analytic capability. In response, other leading scholars agree that the reality of unconscious processes is no longer questionable. Although there is some disagreement about just how sophisticated these processes are, the consensus is that exciting times are ahead for both research and theory concerning the mental processes involved in unconscious cognition.

Freudian Theory↗
PubMed1991

Resolving legal questions with psychological data.

Psychologists are ever finding new legal arenas for their psychological data and concepts. Findings about the character and operation of stereotyping have been introduced in sex discrimination litigation in the United States. Findings about conformity, obedience to authority, and bystander apathy have been introduced into death penalty cases in South Africa. These concrete and detailed applications of psychological science demonstrate the expanding role that psychology is playing in the legal world.

Expert Testimony↗
PubMed1991

Eye fixations and memory for emotional events.

Subjects watched either an emotional, neutral, or unusual sequence of slides containing 1 critical slide in the middle. Experiments 1 and 2 allowed only a single eye fixation on the critical slide by presenting it for 180 ms (Experiment 1) or 150 ms (Experiment 2). Despite this constraint, memory for a central detail was better for the emotional condition. In Experiment 3, subjects were allowed 2.70 s to view the critical slide while their eye movements were monitored. When subjects who had devoted the same number of fixations were compared, memory for the central detail of the emotional slide was again better. The results suggest that enhanced memory for detail information of an emotional event does not occur solely because more attention is devoted to the emotional information.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Recall strategies and memory for health-care visits.

Complex questions in health surveys place heavy cognitive demands on respondents, prompting researchers to appraise how specific cognitive interventions may improve the accuracy of people's answers. Investigators in one experiment asked participants to recall visits to medical providers in forward, backward, or no particular order, and matched results with providers' records. "Free" recall proved marginally superior to forward or backward ordering, although overall respondents underreported the number of visits by 20 percent; participants' gender and self-reported health status, among other factors, also affected quality of recall. The experiment lends support to contentions that the methods of cognitive science applied to survey research better the accuracy of population survey data.

Cognition↗
PubMed1989

Trivial persuasion in the courtroom: the power of (a few) minor details.

Investigated the influence of trivial testimonial detail on judgments of 424 undergraduates who served as mock jurors. Ss read a summary of a court case involving robbery and murder. In Experiment 1, detailed testimony influenced judgments of guilt, even when the detail was unrelated to the culprit. In Experiment 2, detailed testimony was especially powerful when an opposing witness testified that she could not remember the trivial details. Subsequent analyses suggest that the impact of detailed testimony on guilt judgments is mediated by inferences about the eyewitnesses. When eyewitnesses provided more detail, they were generally judged to be more credible, to have a better memory for the culprit's face and for details, and to have paid more attention to the culprit.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Misinformation and memory: the creation of new memories.

Misleading information presented after an event can lead people to erroneous reports of that misinformation. Different process histories can be responsible for the same erroneous report in different people. We argue that the relative proportion of times that the different process histories are responsible for erroneous reporting will depend on the conditions of acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information. Given the conditions typical of most misinformation experiments, it appears that misinformation acceptance plays a major role, memory impairment plays some role, and pure guessing plays little or no role. Moreover, we argue that misinformation acceptance has not received the appreciation that it deserves as a phenomenon worthy of our sustained investigation. It may not tell us anything about impairment of memories, but it does tell us something about the creation of new memories.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Creating new memories that are quickly accessed and confidently held.

In two experiments involving a total of 542 subjects, a series of slides depicting a burglary was shown. After the initial event, subjects were exposed to one or more narratives about the event that contained some misinformation or neutral information about four critical details. Finally, subjects were tested on their memories of what they saw, and their reaction times and confidence levels were measured. When subjects took a standard test in which the misinformation item was a possible response option, they responded very quickly and confidently when making this incorrect choice. Misled subjects responded as quickly and confidently to these "unreal" memories as they did to their genuine memories. It does not seem, then, that the misinformation effect arises from a large proportion of subjects who must resolve a conflict between two memories when they are tested, a conflict that would be expected to take time. When subjects took a modified test in which the misinformation item was not a possible response, misled subjects were as accurate as were controls, but they responded more slowly, regardless of whether they ultimately chose the right or wrong option. These findings indicate that misinformation does introduce some form of interference not detected by a simple test of accuracy.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Qualities of the unreal.

Witnesses to complex events often recall nonexistent objects after being exposed to misleading postevent information. The present series of experiments investigated whether descriptions of these "unreal" memories differ from those of memories based on perception. In Experiment 1 subjects viewed a slide sequence depicting a traffic accident. In one condition, the sequence included a slide involving a yield sign. In a second condition, subjects did not see the sign but merely had its existence suggested. Many subjects in both groups later reported seeing the sign, and these subjects provided verbal descriptions. Descriptions that resulted from suggestion were longer and contained more hedges, more reference to cognitive operations, and fewer sensory details. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a different object. Experiment 3 investigated judges' ability to discriminate the source of the descriptions based on perception and suggestion. Although judges often employed the appropriate criteria, their performance was only slightly above chance. Experiments 4 and 5 revealed that providing judges with clues regarding differences between perceived and suggested memories facilitated discrimination. The results of these experiments indicate that subtle differences exist between perceived and suggested memories, that people have a minimal ability to detect these differences, and that instructions can improve that ability.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

The fate of memory: comment on McCloskey and Zaragoza.

McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) argue that misleading postevent suggestions do not affect the availability of originally encoded information. Their hypothesis stems from empirical work using a modified paradigm in which no effect of postevent information is observed. Although their "no impairment" hypothesis is plausible, careful consideration of the predictions of their experimental test suggests that it may be insufficiently sensitive to reveal the impact of postevent information. A small effect of postevent information can be observed when their paradigm is repeated with a more sensitive recognition test. McCloskey and Zaragoza's no impairment hypothesis is also difficult to reconcile with numerous reports of "blend" memories that reflect a compromise between the original and postevent information.

Forensic Medicine↗
PubMed1985

Eyewitness performance in different psychological types.

A study of 112 subjects examined the performance on a complex memory task by various Jungian psychological types. Although differences did not emerge in terms of overall accuracy, they did emerge in terms of susceptibility to postevent information. Introverts and intuitives, alone and in combination, were found to be more prone to accept both misleading and consistent postevent information, rendering them more likely to be inaccurate in the first case and more likely to be accurate in the second case. A variety of explanations are considered.

Extraversion, Psychological↗