Is a cognitive process reliable

Memories are not copies but reconstructions of our experiences, and therefore memories of events have been shown to vary widely among witnesses. Loftus and Palmer theorized that it could be caused by information supplied after the event that activates our schema ans thereby inducing an altered memory of what actually occurred. So they decided to study the effects of language on memory in a study, Loftus and Palmer (1974). In the study they had 45 university students that watched several videos of car accidents. Then they were given the question, "About how fast were the cars driving when they..." and then they changed the verb for different groups. They got contracted, hit, bumped, collided, or smashed into each other. The results were statistically different between the first and last but not between every one of them even though the speed estimated increased the stronger the verb was. This showed that the participants were influenced by the words used when they were questioned about the even. If memory is altered easily it is not very reliable. Some limitations of the study was that the experiment only was conducted on university students and if they haven't been driving for a very long time it can have been hard for them to estimate the speed that the cars were going and they might have looked a lot at the verbs for clues while a more experienced driver would rely more on experiences and what their instincts are. Also the study was conducted in a lab and not at the actual accident so the accidents did not feel as "real" to the participants and they therefore lacked the emotional content so it's hard to say that this study would be completely accurate in real life events. Some strengths of having the experiment so controlled on the other hand is that it was easy to measure the results and see the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. Also this study has been replicated many times and showed similar results every time. This is a strength since it shows that it was not a one time thing and that it wasn't just a specific group of people that it worked on and that makes the study more reliable. Going back to talking about how the lack of emotional content by not being at the place where it happens, affects the memory. Ihlebaek et al. (2003), staged a robbery involving two robbers armed with guns. The participants were split into two groups. The first group were on the place of the robbery while the second group watched a video of the robbery. The study showed that the group that had watched the video had a more accurate memory of what actually happened.   The people who experienced the robbery probably had much more emotions connected to what they had seen. This support the idea that eye witnesses don't have very reliable memories. A limitation of this experiment is that it was staged and therefore it has a low ecological validity. A strength on the other side, is that the experiment clearly showed the difference between seeing an even with your own eyes and being there compared to looking at a video.