I was able to record the interview and some fascinating areas of interest for example the effect of perception on memory, how schema memory theory works, false memories and general anomalistic psychology.
I am very interested in the deterioration of memory and the creation of false memories and what influences this. A simple test was conducted in the interview-he asked me to describe what the number four looked like on a clock face with roman numerals. I responded with 'IV', and he explained that it was incorrect, and explained that this was an example of my 'expected memory' overriding the truth. On clock faces the number four is always IIII and despite walking past a roman numeral clock on a daily basis, I recalled logical information which overrode it. In normal notation, the number four is usually 'IV'.
Professor French later explained the fallibility of eyewitness reports and explained how a group mentality can affect individuals recollection of events. Suggestive techniques can also change a persons memory of events for example by asking leading questions, which, especially when a person is slightly unsure can affect their memory of events. Doctored photos can also have the same effect. Responses to media stimulus can affect memories and help construct false ones. I am extremely interested on how information can be skewed, misrepresented or created completely.
I was also sent four papers to read.An audio clip has been included and a transcript will be following it soon.
Professor C. French Interview
Professor C. French Interview by siobhanmckenzie90
Transcript
Transcript
Summarised transcript of the conversation.
I’ll talk a bit about memory generally and then anomalous experiences.
The history of research into memory-it’s gone through various different phases. In the past the theory was talking about different types of storage: long term and short term and the processes that got from one to the other.
Everyday memory: Gillian Cohen-the psychology of everyday memory. She talks about scheme theory: the idea is that generally when you are interacting with the world around you, you make a lot of use of your knowledge and your expectations about the way that the world is.
For example if you walk into a restaurant you have a script for that: meet the host, sit down, read the menu etc. If you did something like that and then someone asked you week later to remember the experience various aspects of that, because memory doesn’t work like a video camera and it is a constructive process; when anyone asks you to recall you are building up this memory on the basis of certain bits of information that you remember more or less accurately. There are some gaps, and occasionally you say that you don’t remember, but sometimes we fill in those gaps based on what weexpected to happen. Sometimes that will be accurate but sometimes it won’t be and we’re not even aware that we filled in those gaps.
Example: when we try and remember something we often report the thing we must have seen rather than what we did see: this relates to memory for objects. We know that if you show people video clips or have even staged crimes in front of them, then ask them, they get details wrong: eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable. Even memory for very simple everyday stimuli: we can still get things wrong.
On clocks and watches with roman numerals on how is the number ‘four’ represented? I would say ‘IV’ and this was wrong. I got this wrong because this is how it is notated everywhere but on clocks and watches; they have an unusual way of representing it. The next example is asking people do draw a clock from memory: if they copy it they draw it right, but if they draw it from memory they write what they think they must have seen instead of what they did see. It’s a very simple experiment but it generalises beyond that; in lots of situations.
It relates to perception as well as memory; you perceive ambiguous stimuli in line to your beliefs and expectations, as you remember things that have happened to you hence ‘memory distortion’
Cohen talks about schema theory; the organisation your knowledge about the world into these schema i.e. scripts about what happens in certain situations or schemas for objects i.e. what a dog is. It accounts for an awful lot of memory distortions.
Example: People invited to a psychology experiment: sat in a waiting room of a postgraduates office before they came in. They were then asked about what they remembered about the room. They remembered things that weren’t actually there based on their schema for what should have been in the room, and missed things that they did not expect to see.
Another aspect is that you may not remember things because you didn’t really take it in at the time:
Study: showing people a video clip.
A classic example of selective attention; something is missed because focus is on something else. The original study between Simons and Chabris showed that around 44 percent of people don’t see the gorilla. It goes against your intuition. Another reason that you may not remember something is because you didn’t process or see it at the time. You wouldn’t expect to see a gorilla. Even if the test was made with very obvious stimuli and people still ignore it.
Generally memory is ‘top down processing’; one is the senses, and sometimes that’s ambiguous or not clear and to make sense of it we use our ‘top down processing i.e. ‘beliefs, expectation, general knowledge’ the two interact and it’s a mental model about your place in the world and you can be influenced by your beliefs. You might think you’ve seen something but in actual fact it’s not quite what you say.
False memories:
The research in false memories took off in the 80s particularly in America and all over the world people were going into therapy with fairly common psychological problems i.e. anxiety or depression, but came out believing that they’d been the victims of childhood sexual abuse. And when this came out it was tearing families apart and people were going to prison. The question was whether these recovered memories were actual real or not. This started a lot of experimental research. There are lots of techniques available to see how easy it is to implant false memories and it turns out to be much easier than we would’ve thought. In about 25% typically you can implant some kind of false memory. It’s a bit scary.
Method: Interview someone. ‘Im going to ask you about various events that happened when you were a child’. There were some things that you remembered and some things they couldn’t, but they’d come back a few days later with better memories of the events. Then the test coordinator would invent a memory and ask them to remember it i.e. being lost in a supermarket. Lots of people after going away for a few days and coming back did completely believe that they had experienced this, and even gave details about it i.e. ‘a nice old lady found me and made an announcement’. At this point they test subjects were told that one memory was false, and they could no longer differentiate between the memories that were real and the one that was fake. Again quite scary.
Memory is very malleable and can not only distort things that you did witness, but also making up memories of things that never happened at all.
Paranormal experiences: how reliable are these?
Looking at these same of factors in anomalistic context.
Example: Memory conformity. If you have multiple witnesses and they tell the same story its likely to be treated as having more weight than a single report. However when people witness something i.e. a crime or UFO they discuss it with each-other and another person’s account can influence another person’s memory.
Examples: Video of staged crimes watched by pairs of people, but something is different in each person’s video. They think that they are watching the same video but there are subtle differences. They are the instructed to discuss and come up with an accurate account. In my version I can see that the woman takes some money, but in your version you cant. You find that the people who didn’t see the money being taken actually report that they do which has a massive effect on crime cases.
Emma Greening: Showed a video of an alleged psychic doing some metal bending. After he’s done bending the key, he says ‘if you look closely you’ll see it’s still bending’, and around 40% of people report that they saw it bending. However it wasn’t still bending. If you see the exact same video without the bending suggestions, 0% of people say that they saw it bending.
We borrowed the same tape from Richard and added a memory conformity element. The people were watching in pairs, but one was a stooge instructed to after the video say that it either was bending (Agree) or wasn’t bending (disagree). If the stooge agreed then the amount of reports that people saw it bending went up to 60%.
Things that happen at the time and after the event can influence your memory for the event. ‘Post event information’: someone witness something and then a investigator subtly implies something about what they’ve witness.
Example: Elizabeth Loftess’s work: show people a video of a car accident with a car at a junction and asked some questions about it afterwards. She then said ‘When the red car was stopped at the stop sign… etc….’ or ‘When the red car was stopped at the give way sign… etc….’, this subtle misinformation influenced people recollection of the events. When questioned again a week later you are likely to insert this information.
False memories or anomalous experiences.
What psychological factors correlate to susceptibility to false memories i.e. dissosiativity (mildly altered states of consciousness i.e. away with the fairies) and absorption (people who when reading a book or watching a film completely block out everything around them). Hypnotic susceptibility, Fantasy prone intercorrelate with susceptibility to false memory and paranormal belief and reports of paranormal activity. Looking at this more directly:
Study: ‘Where were you when you first saw the footage of the twin towers collapsing’, you’d probably be able to tell me and be quite confident. Even these fashionable memories are not as reliable as once thought.
Study: Challenger disaster. Questionnaires were given out to student a few days later to ask them about where they were/what they were doing when they first heard the news. A few years later they were contacted again, and what was found was they often didn’t match up despite the students being very sure about their memories. They even said that the information they had previously was wrong and that this new information was right. The confidence in the memory has to reflection on the accuracy of the information, and we often have more faith in a confident person i.e. in courtroom situation than a non-confident person but they are not necessarily more reliable.
In our study we gave people questionnaires about their memory for news footage i.e. where were you etc. We created an imaginary newsworthy event that hadn’t been filmed and 36% of people were happy to tell about what they were doing when they saw this non-existent footage and whether it was in black and white. These people who said they did remember scored higher for belief in paranormal experience.
There are lots of different ways of thinking about memory, and models of memory.
More: Eyewitness testimony and lots of issues do arrive.
Probably the first psychological study of the reliability of eyewitness memory was work from the Victorian era by Davey of the accuracy of reports on séances. He conducted his own séances based on techniques that charlatans used and reproduced those effects in front of gullible people. They wrote down exactly what happened and misremembered thing in a way that they were unexplainable physically. They remembered things that were never even witnessed in the first place that would be in-explainable.
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