The Reliability of Memory

How reliable is memory? Can we trust eyewitness testimony, something based on merely memory? It can be influenced by experience, cultural factors, what people tell us and even repression to protect us from knowing things we can not cope with. We cannot just rely on our memory.

Traumatic events can have a serious impact on our memory. We can recover, but with that process we can build up false memories from the traumatic event. There are a lot of reasons why that is.

If a traumatic event happens and someone has trouble coping with it, is forgetting things (mostly because our memory wants to protect us), we might need to go to therapy. But sometimes that is not the best solution. The therapist might tell us something that can influence our memory. He might use leading questions and that will confuse us. We will think that something may have happened, or we might have seen something that wasn't even there.

Leading questions lead our memory to distortions and false memories of the original information. We can forget the whole context and that will make us lose details of the event, omissions appear.

We can link this to the study of Bartlett: "The War of the Ghosts".

The context got lost, omissions appeared, it was a strange story for the time they were living in. Just like a traumatic event is a strange thing to happen to you. It's strange, you don't see it coming and it's out of place of your normal life routine.

The students, who had to re-tell the story made it shorter, lost details, changed parts of the story and changed the order of events.

Exactly what can happen if you try to recall a traumatic event that your mind has blocked out.

Sometimes it can be hard to reconstruct memories, because we are using our information from the schema we build up for the topic. We rely on what we know, cultural knowledge, what we have experienced, what we have been taught to know. Our schemas can affect our memory at all three stages of encoding, storage and retrieval.

Schemas represent knowledge rather than definitions.

For example, if we think of a cat, we don't think of the definition we have read in the English Dictionary. You might think of your cat Mittens you had when you were 8 years old. But Mittens might have had 3 legs, because he got in a car accident once. So now your schema of a cat might be a furry animal, with whiskers, a tail, 2 ears and 3 legs.

You know a cat has 4 legs, but still, your memory from your childhood recalls Mittens and that might distort your memory.

It is possible to forget something, very possible of course. We forget things on a daily basis. Decay in the memory happens. If the information is not enough rehearsed and not likely to be ever used