My high school psychology teacher gave my class an interesting demonstration on the usefulness of eyewitnesses.
For one class, we found a notice on the door saying that the class had been relocated to another room. We went to that room, and shortly after our teacher arrived, followed by another teacher. He complained that she had not gotten proper clearance to move her class to that room, and he needed it for an exercise for his own class. They spent a couple minutes arguing, and harsh words were exchanged, after which he left the room.
Almost immediately after he left, our teacher asked us to create profiles of his physical description. Estimates of his height ranged from 5′6 to 6′3, his hair was variously described as being brown, black, or red, and his weight was somewhere from 140 pounds to 230.
The information that the students retrieved from their short term memory, which had not yet been encoded as long term memory, was already profoundly unreliable.
Self-perceived truth value sounds like a subtle problem.
I’d settle for memory testing for eye-witnesses, though memory testing under stress is probably too much to ask.
My high school psychology teacher gave my class an interesting demonstration on the usefulness of eyewitnesses.
For one class, we found a notice on the door saying that the class had been relocated to another room. We went to that room, and shortly after our teacher arrived, followed by another teacher. He complained that she had not gotten proper clearance to move her class to that room, and he needed it for an exercise for his own class. They spent a couple minutes arguing, and harsh words were exchanged, after which he left the room.
Almost immediately after he left, our teacher asked us to create profiles of his physical description. Estimates of his height ranged from 5′6 to 6′3, his hair was variously described as being brown, black, or red, and his weight was somewhere from 140 pounds to 230.
The information that the students retrieved from their short term memory, which had not yet been encoded as long term memory, was already profoundly unreliable.