Herman Ebbinghaus (1885) wrote about memory and addressed issues such as how do we remember some things and apparently not others. He distinguishes a group of mental states which 'once present in consciousness return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will; that is, they are reproduced involuntarily....as more exact observation teaches us, the occurrence of these involuntary reproductions is not an entirely random and accidental one. On the contrary they are brought about through the instrumentality of other, immediately present mental images.' Any memory is liable to distortion and is a result of many different processes such as age, decay in the brain, displacement and interference. To distort something is to misrepresent something when retrieving it from memory. A good example is shown in eye - witness testimonies where facts and statements can become distorted and put out of context. Patients who have suffered head trauma tend to have distortions of m!

emory depending on the part of the brain that has b

olence and thought that the opposing team had incurred many more penalties/fouls. If an observer's perception and memory of a college football game can be this distorted it should be difficult to believe the word of an eyewitness in court where a jury may be influenced enough to pass a judgement of guilty or innocent based on this testimony. Misleading information can be suggested after an event that can affect what answers a person gives to later questions and the memory of the incident can be systematically distorted by these questions. Studies have been carried out which show this to be true. Elizabeth Loftus and Palmer(1974) showed subjects a film of a multiple car accident. After viewing the film they were asked a number of specific questions. Some were asked 'How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?', while for others the verb 'hit' was substituted for 'smashed into'. The verbs used had an effect on the estimated speed as the subjects thought the average sp!

een injured. They sometimes fabbricate or confabulate when trying to recall past events or experiences.

ecent) then one may not retrieve all of it or even any of it). If it is a complex event, such as a date one may retrieve parts and then pu the parts together into a whole. How well this reconstruction works depends on whether there are constraints within the parts that may alert you to an accurate or inaccurate reconstruction. The difficulty is when you don't remember enough about the events to know whether they're from the same date or not. You may remember eve

Some common words found in the essay are:
Herman Ebbinghaus, Loftus Palmer1974, Dartmouth Princeton, broken glass, COGNITION SID, seen broken glass, encoded similar events, encoded similar, victim able recognise, confirmation bias, victim able, eye witness, similar events, remember events, 'smashed into', encoded information, seen broken,
Approximate Word count = 1046
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)