Elizabeth Loftus: biography of this American psychologist.

A review of the life of Elizabeth Loftus, well known for her research on memory.

Many believe that the brain is like a computer and, as such, we store a lot of memories completely and intact. When we try to remember we think that what we are remembering is indisputably true, that it is just as we experienced the remembered event.

However, this is not so. Memories can become distorted with the passage of time, and even more so if we are talking about those associated with traumatic experiences. Taking this into account, the following question is inevitable: can our mind create false memories?

The American psychologist and mathematician Elizabeth Loftus has dedicated her entire life to answering this question, motivated by the experience of a traumatic event in her youth and learning how reliable the testimonies of victims, defendants and witnesses of crimes are. We will now delve deeper into her life and her research through a biography of Elizabeth Loftus.

Brief biography of Elizabeth Loftus

Elizabeth Loftus, born Elizabeth Fishman, was born on October 16, 1944 in Los Angeles, California.California. Her parents were Sidney and Rebecca Fishman. When she was only 14 years old, young Elizabeth experienced the death of her mother due to a drowning accident.

Rebecca Fishman's death shocked her entire family and, at the same time, it was what awakened young Elizabeth's interest in memory. After her mother's death, Elizabeth didn't remember didn't remember much about the accident... Had she repressed it?

However, during the 44th birthday celebration of one of her uncles, a relative told Elizabeth that she had been the first to see her mother's lifeless body. Based on this, Elizabeth Loftus began to "remember" little things and became convinced that they were true. But to her surprise, it was later confirmed that she was not the first at the corpse, but that one of her aunts was.

Upon learning this Loftus was amazed at how she herself had become convinced of a story that, though on the surface real, was nothing more than a confabulation. Because of this Elizabeth Loftus became interested in how human beings, from very little information and suggestions, are able to create false memories, memories that are not true but so vivid that it is even unquestionable that they are more than an invention.

In 1966 he received a B.A. with honors in Mathematics and Psychology from the University of Los Angeles. He would later enter Stanford University, where he would obtain his doctorate. In the 1980s he began to address memory in more depth. In those years she began to study various cases of child abuse and how long-term memory worked. She was very interested in how repressed memories related to the traumatic situation experienced by the victims emerged.

She did several investigations and based on her findings Loftus questioned very critically the ability of the human being to retrieve memories and information truthfully, especially when these memories have been repressed by some defensive mechanism of our mind. The main focus of research throughout her career has been to understand how information is organized semantically and gives rise to long-term memory.

Based on these findings, Elizabeth Loftus felt that her work should have some societal relevance, and so she she began to study empirically the testimony of witnesses in trials based on the paradigm of misleading information.. Thus he began to conduct much research on memory and its relationship to the degree of reliability of a witness's trial testimony.

Loftus' research has presented numerous evidences that a person's lived experiences can be altered when they are attempted to be recalled, and appear real and reliable despite being a biased memory. This is especially common in memories of childhood sexual abuse when they are recovered both in the course of forensic investigation and during psychotherapy.

Loftus' views on memory

It is important to understand that when Elizabeth Loftus began her career in research cognitive psychology, which among other things studies memory, was beginning to reveal new aspects of how the brain and mental processes work. Memory has been one of the most interesting topics in this branch of psychology, being the basis of learning and even being a fundamental aspect to give people identity.

But in addition to this, the study of memory has a key importance in the judicial field: it must be determined to what extent theIt is necessary to determine to what extent the memory of a witness is reliable. Loftus focused on studying the possibility not only that the memories of these people could be totally changed, but also that other people could introduce false memories into them. This is why Elizabeth Loftus has been consulted as an expert witness and her work has been used in the field of forensic investigation.

According to Loftus herself, the legal system takes great care and precautions to avoid contaminating physical evidence present at a crime scene, such as hair, blood, semen, torn clothing... However, the same precautions are not taken when it comes to preventing witnesses' memories from being contaminated. Thus, during interrogations, the memory of witnesses can be conditioned by asking suggestive questions, which can have an immense effect on their testimony.

Elizabeth Loftus's career has been very controversial because her research comes to say that the testimony of victims, witnesses, and even the defendant himself is not entirely valid.. No matter how candid they may be in the course of an investigation, there is no way to be sure that their recollections are genuine. They may have been manipulated by lawyers, investigators and even the judge himself may have accidentally influenced by asking a suggestive question.

But despite the controversies Loftus is one of the most highly regarded figures in psychology. He has published more than 20 books and nearly 500 scientific papers on false memory. In addition, he has been awarded several recognitions, such as the "Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement" by the APA. In 2002 she was recognized as one of the most influential psychologists in the General Psychology List of the 100 most influential researchers of the 20th century, ranking 58th and the highest ranking woman on the list.

Research on memories

The idea of memory in popular culture and even in some professional circles is that the brain works like a computer. Based on this belief, memories remain stored and isolated from other mental processes and phenomena, becoming conscious when the time comes that we need to recall that experience or knowledge. We think of memory as simply storing and retrieving files..

However, this is not quite the case. While many memories are intact, sometimes they are not accurate: they are remembered in a blurred, distorted and hollow manner. To fill in these gaps we collude, we add false information unconsciously or we allow ourselves to be influenced by other people who tell us how the events happened, changing our memory and thinking that this new version is the reliable one.

This fact had not been empirically demonstrated until Elizabeth Loftus investigated it thoroughly. Through her experiments she demonstrated that memories are not something that is stored intact and that they can be mixed with others to the point of changing completely, thus creating false memories.

The car experiment (Loftus and Palmer, 1974)

One of the most famous experiments on memory was conducted by Elizabeth Loftus and J. C. Palmer with 45 volunteers who were presented with a recording in which they were presented with a recording of the car. were presented with a recording of two cars crashing into each other.. After presenting them with this recording, the researchers discovered something really curious.

After viewing the recording, the volunteers were asked to recall what they had seen. To do this, a very specific phrase was used to tell them that they had to evoke what they had seen:

"About how fast were the cars going when they.... each other?"

"About how fast were the cars going when they ... each other?"

This was the part where some volunteers and others received subtly different instructions. To some volunteers the phrase used contained the word "contacted," while to others the same phrase was used only changing that word to "hit," "collided," or "smashed." The volunteers were asked to give their opinion about the speed of the two vehicles they had seen..

As we said, all, absolutely all the volunteers saw the same thing. However, Elizabeth Loftus noticed something truly surprising, since when they were asked to recall what appeared in the video the phrase used altered their memories. Those who had been given the instructions with the words "contacted" and "hit" said that the vehicles were going at a slower speed compared to those with whom a phrase containing the words "collided" or "smashed" was used.

That is, the degree of crash intensity suggested by the words used by the research team influenced the perception of speed. In the participants' minds, the memory of the scene they had seen changed. With this experiment, Loftus and Palmer provided evidence about how information given in the present can alter memories of past events.

The shopping mall experiment (Loftus and Pickrell, 1995)

Another very famous experiment by Loftus is the shopping mall experiment, an experiment that showed that it was possible to demonstrated that it was possible to introduce false memories through something as simple and unobtrusive as suggestion. This research had a higher degree of complication, since to carry it out it was necessary to have personal information about the lives of the volunteers. Loftus relied on the help of friends and family members of the participants.

During the first phase of the research, the volunteers were told, one by one, four anecdotes about their childhood. Three of these memories were real, told by people close to the volunteers; however, the fourth memory was completely false. Specifically, it was the story of how the story of how the participants had gotten lost in a shopping mall when they were young, a completely fictitious story.This was a completely fictitious story.

The next phase occurred a few days later. The volunteers were re-interviewed and asked if they remembered anything about the four stories they had been told in the first part of the research. One in four people said they remembered something about what happened when they got lost in the mall, a memory that, as we have said, was entirely fictitious.

But then, when it was revealed to them that one of the four it was revealed to them that one of the four stories they had been told was false, they were asked to guess what happened when they got lost in the mall.The children were asked to guess which one was the fictitious one. Many guessed correctly and could see that it was the one about the shopping mall, but 5 of the 24 participants failed to give the correct answer. These 5 people actually believed that they had been lost in the mall as children, having a very vivid and real memory.

This research showed that with very little effort, Loftus and other researchers were able to introduce a false memory into the participants' memory.

Implications of this research

These experiments succeeded in demonstrating that, contrary to what ordinary people believe, memories are not stored intact, memories are not stored intact. They can be easily altered intentionally, either by using specific questions, false information or through suggestion by someone trusted by the person. They can also be altered by experiences after the event to be remembered or even by our emotions. It is truly revealing and creepy that it is possible to introduce totally false scenes into someone's mind and have them believe them as if they were absolutely real.

Bibliographical references:

• Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of auto-mobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal behavior, 13, 585-589.
• Yuille, J. C., & Cutshall, J. L. (1986). A case study of eyewitness memory of a crime. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(2), 291.
• Loftus, E.F.; Pickrell JE (1995). "The formation of false memories" (PDF). Psychiatric Annals. 25 (12): 720–725. doi:10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-12-03. Retrieved 2009-01-21.