how i got started: from semantic memory to expert testimony
TRANSCRIPT
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: [email protected]
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