“Can our memories be described as accurate? Why or why not? What important implications might this have for our lives?” Memory is the tool we use to learn and think. We all use memory in our everyday lives. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. We all reassure ourselves that our memories are accurate and precise. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from the event and the different features of the situation.
Yet, people don’t realize the fact that the more you think about a situation the more likely the story will change. Our memories are not a camcorder or a camera. Our memory tends to be very selective and reconstructive. Eyewitness testimony is especially vulnerable to error when the question is misleading or when there’s a difference in ethnicity.
However, using an eyewitness as a source of evidence can be risky and is rarely 100% accurate. This can be proven by the theory of the possibility of false memory formation and the question of whether or not a memory can lie. For instance, a group of students saw the face of a young man with straight hair, then heard a description of the face supposedly written by another witness, one that wrongly mentioned light, curly hair. When they reconstructed the face using a kit of facial features, a third of their reconstructions contained the misleading detail, whereas only 5 percent contained it when curly hair was not mentioned (Page 359).
The Essay on Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory
Short term memory (STM) is stored in the brain for approximately 3- 18 seconds, whereas long term memories (LTM) can be stored in the brain from up to a few minutes to a lifetime. STM and LTM have different encoding processes. STM is encoded into the brain mainly by sound (acoustic), the way LTM is encoded into the brain in terms of the word or situations meaning rather than sound (semantically). ...
This situation shows how misleading information from other sources can be profoundly altered. Children’s memories are easier to confuse as those of adults.
For many years most adults believed that children’s memories could not be trusted because children tend to confuse reality with their fantasies. Children just as adults can be accurate in what they report and they also like adult can distort, forget, fantasize, and be misled. As research show, their memories processes are only human. All I know is that I wouldn’t like to be accused by a group of children or students. It’s not quite as reliable as you may have hoped a memory would be. Explicit memory is a conscious, recollection of an event or an item of information.
It is usually measured using recall or recognition methods. Recalling has the ability to retrieve and reproduce information. Recognizing has the ability to identify information you have previously learned, read, or heard about. Recognitions tests can be tricky, especially when false items can resemble correct ones. Most of the times recognitions are easier than recall.
It’s found that when you show people 1, 000 slides and later ask them which ones they remember they ” ll have a greater ability to identify 90% of the slides. Throughout the years we encounter many interferences that alter our memories. We all have fallibility of memory, which means we should not rush to judgment, either about the accuracy of the memories of about the causal connection between past experiences and present problems. We should automatically reject as false, memories which have been repressed for years and are suddenly recollected, nor should we automatically accept such memories as true. In terms of verification of their accuracy, these memories should not be treated any differently than any other type of memory..
