Loftus and Palmer

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Keeley Gillespie Section B Essay Loftus and Palmer (1974) – Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction In the study by Loftus and Palmer, the participants were tested to see whether information supplied after an event changed the way that they recalled the details of it, or whether they recalled details to fit a schema of a previous event. The results of the study were then put into context of a car crash witness, to test if having witness testimonies to prosecute somebody for the crash that occurred are reliable sources of information, or whether the accuracy of what the human mind can recall should be used as a primary source of evidence. The whole study carried out by Loftus and Palmer included 2 different experiments to test whether it was just short term memory that leading questions affected, or whether long term memory was also affected by this factor too. Experiment 1 was the most useful in gathering the important information about how people’s minds worked, and helped Loftus and Palmer reach a conclusion about this information. In experiment 1, Loftus and Palmer gathered 45 participants from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. All of the participants were shown 7 different film clips, some that involved footage of real life crashes, and some that involved staged crashes, varying in lengths from 5 to 30 seconds. After each clip the participants were asked to write an account of what they had just seen in the crash, as well as this, the participants were also asked a set of questions, unknowingly answering the critical question which regarded how fast they thought the vehicle was travelling at the time of the crash. This question gave Loftus and Palmer the information about how people’s minds filled in the gaps of an event depending on the questions asked. The basis of the question was “About how fast were the cars going when they _______ each

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