PSY 005 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Eyewitness Identification, Autobiographical Memory, Social Cognition

• School: College of The Sequoias
• Department: Psychology (PSY)
• Course: PSY 005
• Professor: Fulmer

Document Summary

Most social cognition theorists assume that retrieval occurs by using schemas to search memory. Autobiographical memory: stored information about the self: involves estimating what we were like in the past, rather slippery, can be influenced by our motives and beliefs. It may be possible to tamper with autobiographical memory. We often reconstruct personal memories based on information that is currently accessible to us. It is also possible for us to have seemingly real memories of events that we simply heard about or imagined occurring: dreams. Risky to rely on one person"s memory of a complex event to make an important decision. The consequence is that an eyewitness identification can dramatically affect the course of the investigation and the trial. Human memory is fallible perhaps especially when the eyewitness was emotionally fearful or upset. Numerous studies have shown that people exposed to an event and later asked to identify the perpetrator often select the wrong individual.