how i got started: from semantic memory to expert testimony

End Notes

How I Got Started: From Semantic Memory to Expert Testimony

ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS*

University of California, Irvine, USA

When asked to write an essay on ‘How I got started’ for

Applied Cognitive Psychology, I was flattered but quickly

realised I needed clarification. How I got started in

Psychology? How I got started in Memory? How I got

started in Cognitive applications to the legal field? The editor

narrowed my task when he wrote: ‘She was a straight

cognitive person specialising in semantic memory and within

a couple of years, it seems, was jetting all over the States

giving testimony. How she got there—and what her

colleagues thought—would make an interesting article’.

(GrahamDavies, personal communication, 12 Oct 2010, thus

the British spelling). So, Graham, here’s the path from

semantic memory to expert testimony.

While still in graduate school, I was involved in two main

research projects—one concerning computer assisted

instruction, with my PhD advisor, Patrick Suppes. And

another involving semantic memory, begun in collaboration

with Jonathan Freedman. After obtaining my doctorate in

psychology, I continued with the semantic memory line of

work. Semantic memory, of course, involves memory for

words and concepts and general knowledge rather than

memory for the personal experience in life. My focus was on

how general knowledge is stored in the human mind and how

it can be retrieved when needed. I had my lab, with eager

graduate students, and we published some papers that I was

quite proud of at the time (e.g. Loftus & Freedman, 1972;

Loftus & Scheff, 1971).

But one day, I was having lunch with my lawyer-cousin.

She said: ‘So you’re an experimental psychologist. Have you

made any discoveries?’ ‘Yes’, I replied proudly. ‘I’ve

discovered that people are faster to give you the name of a

fruit that you say is yellow than they are if you asked for the

name of a yellow fruit. They’re 250 milliseconds faster or

about a quarter of a second’.

My cousin looked at mewith an expression that might best

be described as incredulity with a slight touch of disdain. She

had but one question that was approximate this: ‘How much

did we pay for that bit of information?’—referring, I

suppose, to the fact that my work may have been supported

by a grant of federal funds.

The difference in reaction time was important in my field

because it demonstrated that humans tend to organise

information according to categories, in this instance the

category of fruits, rather than by attributes, such as yellow. A

memory search for information can get underway sooner if

the category cue is presented first.

But my cousin’s reaction was unnerving and made me

want to study something that had more practical relevance. I

had always had an interest in legal issues and court cases.

With my background in memory, wouldn’t it make sense to

study the memories of witnesses to crimes and accidents and

other legally relevant events? I thought it would be

interesting, for instance, to try to figure out whether the

structure of questions posed to witnesses by the police,

investigators, or lawyers affected what people remembered

and what they said. So I undertook a series of experiments

using films of accidents or simulated crimes and studied how

people recalled what they were shown. (The first film clips I

used were segments from longer driver’s education films

borrowed from the local safety council and police depart-

ment.) Using these materials as stimuli, I and my students

showed that leading questions could affect how people

remembered these critical events, and later, more generally

that post-event misinformation could have damaging effects

on witness’s memories (e.g. Loftus, 1975; Loftus & Palmer,

1974). One thing that I was doing differently from other

memory researchers was showing people films of accidents

or crimes. Most others at this time were studying memory for

more pallid materials, like word lists or occasionally

individual photos. I once got a backhanded compliment

from a colleague: ‘Many people think she is doing mere

applied psychology, but I think there is a lot more there’.

After studying the laboratory witnesses for a few years, I

was keenly interested in seeing how real witnesses to real

crimes behaved as they interacted with people who

questioned them. I had recently moved to Seattle,

Washington, and I happened to know the chief trial attorney

at the local public defender’s office. I offered him a deal: I’d

share findings from psychological science that might be

relevant or helpful to some case he was handling, and of

course would help him at no expense to him, if he would let

me see the witnesses and other participants in a case up close

and personal. He had the perfect case. It involved a woman

(whom I would later call ‘Sally’) who was accused of

murdering her boyfriend who had been abusing her for quite

some time. The prosecutor called it first-degree murder, but

her lawyer claimed self-defence. Both sides agreed that Sally

and her boyfriend had argued, whereupon Sally ran into the

bedroom, grabbed a gun, and shot her boyfriend six times. At

trial, a key issue was the amount of time that elapsed between

the grabbing of the gun and the first shot. Sally, and her sister

who was in the apartment, said two seconds, but another

Applied Cognitive Psychology, Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 25: 347–348 (2011)Published online 1 February 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1769

*Correspondence to: Elizabeth F. Loftus, University of California, Irvine,USA. E-mail: eloftus@uci.edu

Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

witness said five minutes. Two seconds versus five minutes

made a huge difference as to whether Sally had shot

suddenly, in fear, and thus in self defence. Or whether she

had short with premeditated intent—and was thus guilty of

murder. In the end, Sally was acquitted.

I wrote an article about the burgeoning science and Sally’s

case for Psychology Today magazine. It was entitled

‘Reconstructing Memory: The Incredible Eyewitness’

(Loftus, 1974). Psychology Today was a popular magazine,

with a circulation of over a million that included many

judges, lawyers, and other members of the legal profession.

As a result of the article, I began receiving phone calls from

lawyers asking if I would work on their cases or speak about

the psychology of memory at their continuing education

seminars. Calls came in from judges to speak at judicial

conferences.

This new part of my professional life—interacting with

the legal profession through consulting and education—was

exhilarating (and somewhat lucrative as well, when I was no

longer typically giving away my time for free). The court

cases became memorable material for my classes and talks.

Who does not love the true crime angle? Research ideas

sometimes came from a puzzle in a case I had worked on.

Along the way I met some of the most notorious criminals of

the last century, like Ted Bundy and the Hillside Strangler.

I’ve met people whom I am convinced were innocent like

Steve Titus whose case I wrote about in Witness for the

Defense (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991). I sat across a table

interviewing Martha Stewart in her attorney’s office, and had

a tour of Oliver North’s bullet-proof vest factory during his

troubles in the l980s. I got to read original police reports or

other documents in cases involving other accused people like

Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson and the Duke University

Lacross players. I love going into work for many reasons but

one of them is that there is a decent probability that the phone

will ring and someone interesting will ask for my help.

Recently I was in the office preparing for my class when

the phone rang with a different kind of call. What would I

think about a possible TV series based on a female

psychologist who uses the psychology of memory in legal

cases? Paramount/CBS just bought the idea—a show

tentatively called ‘Mind Games’. With an incredibly talented

writer, Roger Wolfson, the script for the pilot is being

developed. Wolfson has written for ‘Law and Order: SVU’,

‘Saving Grace’, and the ‘Closer’—all popular television

shows in the United States. One possible story line for ‘Mind

Games’, which is set in Seattle, Washington, is this: A

woman shoots and kills her husband and says it was self-

defence. She says he was attacking her in their living room

and she ran to the bedroom and came back five seconds later

with his gun. Awitness hears the shooting, and recalls things

in a way that suggests more than a minute elapsed—thus

first-degree murder. ‘Dr. Stefanie Glisson’—a young

psychology professor with an expertise in memory—helps

to show that the wife was not guilty. Sally would be smiling

if she knew. At the moment the Sally-inspired script is

under development. I guess art really does sometimes imitate

life.

REFERENCES

Loftus, E. F. (1974). Reconstructing memory: The incredible eyewitness.

Psychology Today, 8, 116–119.

Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive

Psychology, 7, 560–572.

Loftus, E. F., & Freedman, J. L. (1972). Effect of category-name frequency

on the speed of naming an instance of the category. Journal of Verbal

Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 343–347.

Loftus, E. F., & Ketcham, K. (1991). Witness for the defense; the accused,

the eyewitness, and the expert who puts memory on trial. NY: St. Martin’s

Press.

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile

destruction: An example of the inter-action between language and

memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585–589.

Loftus, E. F., & Scheff, R. W. (1971). Categorization norms for fifty

representative instances. Journal of Experimental Psychology Mono-

graph, 91, 355–364.

Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 25: 347–348 (2011)

348 E. F. Loftus