IA Loftus and Palmer

This experiment was conducted by two scientists named Loftus and Palmer.  This to psychologists had an extreme uneasiness because they knew that memory was not an accurate way to store past events.  They knew that memory could be distorted with the most minimum event.  So the aim of this experiment was to investigate how information supplied after an event, influences a witness’ memory for that event.  This means that they wanted to investigate if something as simple as an adjective could distort somebody’s memory.  They did this by showing a group of 45 students of the University of Washington.  They showed the students seven video clips of car crashes.  These videos were the ones used to driver classes to show them what could happen in the roads.  The clips ranged between 5 and 30 seconds of duration.  After each clip the scientists asked to answer some question but certainly guess the speed of the cars involved in the collision.   They separated the group of 45 kids into 5 groups of 8 persons.  They made a different question to each group, but the basic question was “About how fast were the cars going when they ***** each other?  Each group had a different word; these words were smashed, collided, bumped, hit, and contacted.  The independent variable was the different words that described the incident, and the dependent variable was the estimated speed that the students gave.  The entire experiment lasted about an hour and a half to two hours.  The results of the experiment were these ones:

Verb               Mean Estimate of Speed (mph)

Smashed                     40.8

Collided                      39.3

Bumped                      38.1

Hit                              34.0

Contacted                   31.8

As the results show the experiment proved that in deed the change of one word can distort an eyewitness memory.  Loftus and Palmer gave two explanations for these results in the first experiment.

1.       “Firstly, they argue that the results could be due to a distortion in the memory of the participant.  The memory of how fast the cars were traveling could have been distorted by the verbal label which had been used to characterize the intensity of the crash.”

2.      “Secondly, they argue that the results could be due to response-bias factors, in which case the participant is not sure of the exact speed and therefore adjusts his or her estimate to fit in with the expectations of the questioner.” (Loftus and Palmer)

Sex Differences in Memory and Cultural Differnces in Memory

Gender Differences

The difference in memory of the genders does exist.  Women have an episodic memory more efficient than men.  They have advantages that beat one another, but both have specific strengths, different but at last are strengths.  Let’s say there is a man and a women trapped in a forest, the man would find his way back faster because he has a better short and long term memory.  Evolution has developed this, women have a better memory to remember women faces and this has been proved to be truth.  The truth is that women have better memory to remember faces.

Cultural Differences

When was your first memory? Probably when you were at the age of 4.  Many psychologists had a question; does the difference of cultures make a difference in your memory?  Well the truth is that it does have difference and it happens to be that the culture that has the best memory are the Maoris, they got a better memory that Caucasians and Koreans and many other cultures.

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect for me is a way to completely full the subject.  In my opinion when you give a placebo to the subject, the brain has a reaction because it is fooled and it reacts as if it really received the medicine.  So in my opinion when you receive a real medicine your body does a big part, so this may mean that most medicines have no real effect.  This again shows the strength of the human body.  The problem with placebos is that with the minimum disagreement with the medicine and the placebo effect will not occur, because the brain will not be fooled and will not let go the chemicals that make the chemical reaction that will make you feel better.  I also think that if the medicine companies would put four or six placebos in the bottle of pills and nobody would notice it because you are expecting to receive the real medicine, and when you expect it, and do not even imagine that placebos could be in the bottle but it will always make you feel better if your body can handle the sickness that is tormenting you in that precise moment.  If they told me to take a pill and I feel that it did not work I would only think that the medicine did not had effect on me, but I would never guess that I took a placebo.  The placebo effect is real but, at the same time is an illusion because it occurs but it doesn’t occur.