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Psychology Past to Present — The Five Approaches

Classic Evidence (Cognitive): Loftus and Palmer (1974) — conclusions

  • 3 things to know
  • AS Unit 1

Overview

Recall questions on Loftus and Palmer — conclusions.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Evaluation

What is the central conclusion about the nature of memory?

Study

Which real-world study challenges Loftus and Palmer's conclusions, and how?

Key term

Given both sets of findings, what is the fairest judgement about eyewitness memory?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Why do the broken glass results favour the memory-alteration explanation?

    Model answer

    The effect appeared a week later on a completely different question, so the verb must have changed what was stored rather than simply biasing the immediate answer.

  2. 2

    What is the central conclusion about the nature of memory?

    Model answer

    Memory is reconstructive: information from the original event and information supplied afterwards are merged into a single representation that the witness cannot separate.

  3. 3

    Identify two ethical issues in the study.

    Model answer

    Participants were deceived about the purpose and were asked a deliberately misleading question, so their consent was not fully informed, and the accident films had the potential to distress some of them.

  4. 4

    What are the implications of the study for the courts?

    Model answer

    It warns that a confident eyewitness may be sincerely mistaken, so eyewitness evidence should be treated with caution and juries should be directed accordingly.

  5. 5

    Give a strength of the study relating to its scientific quality.

    Model answer

    The standardised films and questions gave high control and make the procedure easy to replicate, and it has been repeated many times with similar results.

  6. 6

    Why is the ecological validity of the study questioned?

    Model answer

    Watching a film clip lacks the shock, stress and consequences of witnessing a real crash, and participants knew that nothing depended on the accuracy of their answers.

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Psychology Past to Present — The Five Approaches
Contemporary Debates
Principles of Research and Application of Research Methods
Mathematical Requirements for Psychology (Appendix A: AS Unit 2 and A2 Unit 4)

Cram a whole paper in one sitting

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Memory is .
reconstructivereproductivepermanent

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Rapid timed gap-fills on the terms and numbers you need to recall without thinking.

AParticipants volunteer and are already motivated.
BSamples are self-selecting.
CNo convincing placebo version exists.

Build It gets the exam shape right

Assemble a full-mark answer from its marking points, in the order an examiner wants them.

An MRI scan images structure only.
TrueFalse

Test It catches misconceptions

Spot the fault in a statement. The traps are the mistakes students actually make.

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Brain Breaks between sessions

Short focus games to reset attention, so the next set lands better than the last.

Every question in Psychology Past to Present — The Five Approaches, on a schedule.

Attempt a question from memory, write the correct version, then attempt it again. Levo records the jump between your first attempt and your last, and brings each question back on the day you are due to forget it.

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