Reconstruction Of Automobile Destruction: An Example Of The Interaction Between Language And Memory Research?

This experiment is a replica of Loftus and Palmer’s (1974) Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction between Language and Memory research. The aim is to investigate the effect of leading questions on eyewitness testimony of an event. The independent variable is the verb in the critical question, such as ‘smashed,’ or ‘hit,’ and the dependent variable is the participants speed estimate of the cars. The study was done by asking 30 students to watch seven short car crash videos, and then asking them to fill out a questionnaire, with the critical question being: “about how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” The verb ‘hit’ was changed to other verbs such as ‘smashed,’ ‘collided,’ ‘contacted,’ and
In Loftus and Palmer’s (1974) research, they aimed to test how language can influence memory in eyewitness testimonies. They gathered 45 students that were split into 5 group and asked them to each watch seven short video clips of car accidents that were 5 to 30 seconds long. After each clip, they would give the students a short questionnaire, including the critical question: “about how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” However, for every group the verb in the critical question was different, and they did this by replacing the verb with other verbs such as ‘smashed,’ ‘collided,’ ‘contacted,’ and ‘bumped.’ After the researchers got their results, they averaged out the speed estimates of the participants for each verb and compared them. They found out that the participants who were asked with verbs such as ‘smashed’ or ‘hit’ had higher speed estimates, while verbs like ‘contacted’ and ‘collided’ had lower speed estimates. From the findings, Loftus and Palmer argued that different verbs indicate different levels of damage, which influenced the participants’ recall of the speed of the car as either going faster or
Bartlett argued that people don’t recall information based on exactly what they saw or heard, but rather, based on their schema. A schema is a mental structure or representation or network or model of a belief, pattern, or expectation. When the participants heard the verbs ‘smashed,’ ‘collided,’ ‘contacted,’ ‘hit,’ or ‘bumped,” their brain unconsciously uses its preexisting knowledge and schema of the words to answer the question. For example, the word ‘smashed’ may have a strong and negative connotation, while words like ‘bumped’ may evoke gentler thoughts. However, other studies such Yuille and Cutshall (1986) contradicts this experiment because they argue that misleading questions don’t have a big effect on memory recall, and thus Loftus and Palmers experiment can’t prove that memory is always reconstructed. Our team decided to replicate Loftus and Palmer’s study aiming to investigate the effect of leading questions on eyewitness testimony of an