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Reliability of Memory - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Aim
        
        Investigate how leading questions can influence eyewitness memory
      - The study was carried out on American students, who were shown a video of a car crashThe students were randomly divided into groups, and each group was asked a slightly different question regarding the speed of the cars at the time of the accident.One group was asked "How fast were the cars going when theysmashedeach other?", while for other groups, the word smashed was replaced by either hit,collided,orbumped
      - Participants estimate that the cars were travelling at a significantly higher speed when the question involved the wordsmashed.Significantly more participants also reported seeing broken glass when the question involved the wordsmashed(in reality, there was none
      - Leading questions can alter memory of an event. This may be because the word"smashed"is associated with severe accidents, suggesting higher speeds and broken glass.
      - Evaluation. A well-controlled laboratory experiment, demonstrating a causal relationship between the independent variable (the verb in the leading question) and the dependent variables (speed estimate and whether broken glass was reported). Participants were all American university students, so the findings may not apply to other cultures or age groups.In particular, the students who took part in this experiment may have not had much driving experience. Perhaps more experienced drivers would be less susceptible to leading questions regarding car speed. This experiment took place in a laboratory, and the speed estimates carried no real-life significance.Therefore,participants may not have been particularly motivated to be accurate.It is possible that someone who had seenan accident in real life would take greater care to report an accurate accident speed to the police
- - - - System 1 tends to be our default system of cognition when we are short of time or too tired to give a question a lot of thought.
    - - System 2 is more rational, analytical and goal-directed thinking and requires deliberate effort and time. System 2 refers to the processes that kick in when we stop, pay attention and think.
  - - - Determine whether "educated intuition" led doctors to make more accurate estimations about patients' survival probabilities than more deliberate thought.
      - 86 medical experts and 57 novices selected by purposive sampling from academic and non-academic hospitals and from a university medical centre in the Netherlands between April 2009 and May 2011.
      - he participants were presented with four fictitious medical case histories. The four case histories were presented by a computer in the form of statements and clinical test results. Half of the participants were encouraged to engage in conscious thought for four minutes about the patient's life expectancy. The other half were distracted by performing an anagram task for four minutes. The participants were then asked to estimate the probability that each patient would be alive in 5 years.
      - There was a significant difference in task performance between the novices and the experts. There was no significant difference in accuracy between the conscious and unconscious thinking conditions.
      - Unconscious, intuitive thought did not lead to better or worse performance than deliberate, conscious thought.
  - - - Algorithmscan help people solve problems and make decisions. An algorithm is a well-defined process that will produce the right solution or the best decision. Algorithms are an example of System 2 as they require deliberate thinking, logical rules and procedures. Solving a maths problem by using a formula is an example of an algorithm in action.
    - - are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that generally, but not always, produce the right outcome. Heuristics offer a trade-off between helping us make quick decisions and being occasionally wrong.
      - FOX
        
        Fox (2006) Fox (2006) aimed to understand how the availability heuristic (or in this case the unavailability of information) influences judgements about the quality of university courses. In this field experiment, sixty-four business students at an American college completed a mid-course evaluation form. They were randomly assigned to two conditions. Half of the participants were asked to list two ways the course could be improved before they provided an overall rating for the course from one to seven with seven being the highest. The other participants were asked to list ten ways the course could be improved before they gave their overall evaluation..
        The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the mean score of 4.92 for the group asked to list two improvements and the mean score of 5.52 for the group asked to list ten improvements. Fox explained this paradoxically (paradoxically = not what is expected) in terms of the availability heuristic When participants struggled to think of ten ways to improve the course they misinterpreted the difficulty of recalling problems with the course as evidence that there were not so many problems after all