Dixon
04-17-2013, 06:32 PM
by Dixon Wragg
WaccoBB.net
Column #16: Eyewitness to Bad Memory
In my last three columns (1), I discussed limitations on certainty. Now let's look at two more, related sources of "certainty" that nearly all of us trust too much: memory and eyewitness testimony.
21341Like just about everyone else, I grew up thinking memory is sort of like video recording. We might lose parts of a "data file", or even whole files, and what images we have may be out of focus so that details are obscured, and we may have difficulty retrieving data, but memory is supposedly a fundamentally faithful reproduction of our experience.
It wasn't until the "Satanic Ritual Abuse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse)" (SRA) scare of the 1980s-90s, which was based largely on claims of "recovered memories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_memory_therapy)", that I noticed much controversy about the nature of memory. One result of that moral panic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic) was research showing that false memories could be implanted (2), and indeed the extremely biased and directive interrogation techniques of social workers and others who drove the SRA scare appear to have done just that in many cases. "...(M)emories can be confabulated, re-interpreted and even apparently vivid or dramatic memories can be false, a risk that is increased when therapists use suggestive techniques, attempt to link symptoms to past trauma, with certain patients and through the use of methods to stimulate memories" (3).
As it turns out, memory is far from a faithful recording process. It's a process of construction involving various sub-processes which depend on normal, healthy functioning of a number of brain structures, and even in a healthy brain, problems can arise at any stage (encoding, storage, or retrieval). For instance, memories can fail to be encoded in the first place due to insufficient attention. Memories in storage degrade, initially quite quickly, then more gradually. Even assuming a memory was encoded properly and is still represented in the brain, the remembering process is fraught, involving retrieval of various parts of the memory, often from different areas of the brain, then synthesis of these parts into one coherent memory. In this process, pieces of entirely different memories, or fantasies, or dream images, or suggestions from a therapist, interrogator or hypnotist can be included in one patchwork "memory" which may seem as real as any. In disorders such as PTSD, people can even confuse memories with current reality, with unpleasant, even life-threatening results.
Some of the factors which affect our ability to make memories and to recall them accurately include stress, social pressures, intensity of emotion, similarity of the recalling situation to the memorizing situation, the desirability or lack of desirability of the memory, and interference from other knowledge ("retroactive interference" when learning something new makes it harder to recall older information, and "proactive interference" when prior learning disrupts attempts to memorize new material).
From the synopsis of a classic study (4) which established the existence of a source of memory distortion and even false memories, known as the "misinformation effect":
21342
"[S]ubjects viewed films of automobile accidents and then answered questions about events occurring in the films. The question "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" elicited higher estimates of speed than questions which used the verbs collided, bumped, contacted, or hit in place of smashed. On a retest one week later, those subjects who received the verb smashed were more likely to say "yes" to the question "Did you see any broken glass?", even though broken glass was not present in the film. These results are consistent with the view that the questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one's memory of that event."
It's easy to see how that effect could be misused, consciously or unconsciously, by, e.g., an overzealous prosecutor, or a social worker who has been caught up in a moral panic.
Notice that the imperfection of memory unavoidably implies the imperfection of a source of knowledge that many of us have tended to honor as a gold standard of evidence: eyewitness testimony. How many times have we seen eyewitness testimony cited, and accepted, as authoritative? How many people are sitting in prison, or moldering in the grave, due to eyewitness testimony?21343
But those who have the most experience with eyewitness testimony, such as professional investigators, learn to be way more skeptical about it than we average folks (although that doesn't necessarily stop them from invoking it when they want to convict someone). They know from experience that multiple witnesses--even sane and honest ones—will often give divergent accounts of the same event. Even confessions can be inaccurate (5).
The considerable fallibility of memory, in and of itself, should decrease our estimation of the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, which, after all, is just a report of a memory. Thus it can be no more trustworthy than memory at best. But on top of that, there are other factors which decrease the dependability of eyewitness testimony.
Around 1990, well-known skeptical investigator James Randi and his associates were wondering what in the world people got from spending their hard-earned money on paranormal practitioners. What was satisfying them so that they'd keep coming back, wallets open, for more? They requested and received from a client of prominent "spirit medium" Maureen Flynn an audio recording of an actual session. This customer declared himself well-satisfied, saying that Flynn had proffered about half a dozen names during the session, all of which were names (or in some cases just close to the names) of his deceased loved ones.
21344
Then Randi told him what they'd heard on the recording of the session. Flynn had, in fact, mentioned thirty-seven names--the vast majority rejected as misses by the client himself--and had also asked him if he "connected with" any names beginning with "n" or "l"! She would say something like "Mary...I'm picking up the name Mary. Is that someone you know?" If told it wasn't, she'd then say something like, "Margie then; it must be Margie. Does that name ring a bell?" Using this "cold reading (https://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm)" technique, she'd eventually stumbled upon nine names the client endorsed as being his deceased loved ones'--or just close. And even that was a stretch, as in one case the name was of a distant relative he'd hardly known, and in another, a neighbor's dog! Upon being told the name was a "hit", she'd then deliver a typical client-satisfying message about how great the afterlife is and how much the dead relative loves him.
Somehow this man's memory had transformed this tawdry, stumbling, dishonest process into a satisfying wonderment (6). It's interesting to note here the extreme degree of distortion in the memory. A (probably causative) relationship between certain emotional needs and the memory distortion is apparent.
Add to that other factors that can distort eyewitness testimony, such as delusion, hallucination, misinterpretation of perceptions, sleight of hand, and plain old lying, and the credibility we attribute to it ought to dwindle even more.
For example, let's look at misinterpretation of perceptions, a foible we're all more subject to than we think. In a discussion of lake monsters, investigator Joe Nickell says, "You get something called 'expectant attention' - which means that, once you get the idea that there's a monster in the lake, almost anything you see, whether it's a floating log, or otters swimming in a line, looks like a multi-humped creature." (7) Elsewhere, (8) he recounts this true tale:
"Consider, for example, the experience of a senior wildlife technician with New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, Jon Kopp. As he explained to me, it had been dark and he was in a duck blind on a lake in Clinton County. Suddenly, he saw, heading toward him, a huge, snake-like monster swimming with a sinuous, undulating motion. As it came closer, however, Kopp realized that he saw not one creature but half a dozen—a group of otters swimming in a line diving and resurfacing to create the effect of a single, serpentine creature. “After seeing this,” Kopp said, “I can understand how people can see a ‘sea serpent’”..."
21349
We're not accustomed to looking at our experiences phenomenologically—that is, carefully distinguishing what we're actually perceiving from the layers of assumption and interpretation we immediately overlay. Another example: years ago I worked at a mental hospital in an old building, the basement of which was not used much anymore. There was a persistent "ghost story" about a mysterious light that could be seen through the basement window, moving around in there. I saw that spooky light myself one night! But instead of assuming it was a light inside the basement, I considered the idea that it may be a light from elsewhere reflected on the window. Using the Law of Mirrors (angle of incidence equals angle of reflection), I visually followed the sight-line to the real source: a light in a nearby parking lot. Wavy imperfections in the old glass of the window caused the reflected light to appear to move around as one walked past. An eyewitness who reported a light moving around in the basement, as opposed to a reflection on the window glass, would be tainting the facts with a layer of automatic interpretation without even knowing it—as we all do frequently.
21346https://img820.imageshack.us/img820/204/dixs.png 22932I'll close with the true story that first showed me the undependability of eyewitness testimony. In 1978 a panda escaped from the Rotterdam Zoo. Officials issued a media alert, and soon panda sightings were coming in from all over the Netherlands—around a hundred in all. As it turned out, the panda had gotten only a very short distance from the zoo before being killed by a train (9)! With no reason to believe there were any other pandas running around the Netherlands, how can we account for those hundred eyewitness reports? What does this example teach us about the accuracy of eyewitness reports in general? And if both memory and eyewitness reports are way less credible than we like to think, how much can we reasonably say we know, and to what degree of certainty?
The crowning irony here is that, for years, I remembered that story as being about an escaped kangaroo, not an escaped panda! It was only as I was writing this essay, when an Internet search failed to find the kangaroo story and I finally tracked down the panda story, that my all-too-human memory was refreshed.
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/ImagesforMembers/DixonCroppedSmall.jpg
About Dixon: I'm a hopeful monster, committed to laughter, love, and the Golden Rule. I see reason, applied with empathy, as the most important key to making a better world. I'm a lazy slob and a weirdo. I love cats, kids, quilts, fossils, tornadoes, comic books, unusual music, and too much else to mention. I’m a former conservative Christian, then New Ager, now a rationalist, skeptic and atheist. I've won awards for my short fiction, short humor, and poetry (both slam performances and "old school")--as well as this column! Lately I’m a Workshopping Editor at the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form (That’s right!). I’m job-hunting too, mostly in the Human Services realm. Passions: Too many -- Reading, writing, critical thinking, public speaking, human rights, sex and sensuality, arts and sciences, nature. Oh, and ladies, I’m single ;^D
NOTES
1. https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?89817-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-13-The-Tangled-Web-of-Lies (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?89817-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-13-The-Tangled-Web-of-Lies)
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?95075-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-14-Onward-Through-the-Fog! (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?95075-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-14-Onward-Through-the-Fog%21)
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?96222-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-15-Are-You-Certain&p=163092#post163092
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique Accessed on 4/5/13.
3. Disputed Memories (2004/02 ed.). The Hague: Health Council of the Netherlands. 2004-01-27. ISBN 905545123.
4. Loftus EF & Palmer JC (1974). "Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory". Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 13: 585.
5. Some examples of false confessions and other false eyewitness testimony that immediately come to mind (because I recently saw these two documentary movies) involve the "West Memphis 3" and "Central Park 5" cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Memphis Accessed on 4/5/13.
https://entertainment.time.com/2013/01/08/qa-the-central-park-five-on/ Accessed on 4/5/13.
6. Verbal report from James Randi at the CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) conference at the Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley/Oakland hills, May, 1991.
7. https://www.scifidimensions.com/Mar01/jnf_crypto.htm Accessed on 4/5/13. Other animals which sometimes swim in single file at the surface so that groups of them may be mistaken for one much larger creature include some types of sharks, dolphins, and whales.
8. Radford, Benjamin, and Joe Nickell. 2006. Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 38 Referenced in https://www.csicop.org/sb/show/lake_monster_lookalikes/ Accessed on 4/5/13.
9. Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 43.
WaccoBB.net
Column #16: Eyewitness to Bad Memory
In my last three columns (1), I discussed limitations on certainty. Now let's look at two more, related sources of "certainty" that nearly all of us trust too much: memory and eyewitness testimony.
21341Like just about everyone else, I grew up thinking memory is sort of like video recording. We might lose parts of a "data file", or even whole files, and what images we have may be out of focus so that details are obscured, and we may have difficulty retrieving data, but memory is supposedly a fundamentally faithful reproduction of our experience.
It wasn't until the "Satanic Ritual Abuse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse)" (SRA) scare of the 1980s-90s, which was based largely on claims of "recovered memories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_memory_therapy)", that I noticed much controversy about the nature of memory. One result of that moral panic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic) was research showing that false memories could be implanted (2), and indeed the extremely biased and directive interrogation techniques of social workers and others who drove the SRA scare appear to have done just that in many cases. "...(M)emories can be confabulated, re-interpreted and even apparently vivid or dramatic memories can be false, a risk that is increased when therapists use suggestive techniques, attempt to link symptoms to past trauma, with certain patients and through the use of methods to stimulate memories" (3).
As it turns out, memory is far from a faithful recording process. It's a process of construction involving various sub-processes which depend on normal, healthy functioning of a number of brain structures, and even in a healthy brain, problems can arise at any stage (encoding, storage, or retrieval). For instance, memories can fail to be encoded in the first place due to insufficient attention. Memories in storage degrade, initially quite quickly, then more gradually. Even assuming a memory was encoded properly and is still represented in the brain, the remembering process is fraught, involving retrieval of various parts of the memory, often from different areas of the brain, then synthesis of these parts into one coherent memory. In this process, pieces of entirely different memories, or fantasies, or dream images, or suggestions from a therapist, interrogator or hypnotist can be included in one patchwork "memory" which may seem as real as any. In disorders such as PTSD, people can even confuse memories with current reality, with unpleasant, even life-threatening results.
Some of the factors which affect our ability to make memories and to recall them accurately include stress, social pressures, intensity of emotion, similarity of the recalling situation to the memorizing situation, the desirability or lack of desirability of the memory, and interference from other knowledge ("retroactive interference" when learning something new makes it harder to recall older information, and "proactive interference" when prior learning disrupts attempts to memorize new material).
From the synopsis of a classic study (4) which established the existence of a source of memory distortion and even false memories, known as the "misinformation effect":
21342
"[S]ubjects viewed films of automobile accidents and then answered questions about events occurring in the films. The question "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" elicited higher estimates of speed than questions which used the verbs collided, bumped, contacted, or hit in place of smashed. On a retest one week later, those subjects who received the verb smashed were more likely to say "yes" to the question "Did you see any broken glass?", even though broken glass was not present in the film. These results are consistent with the view that the questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one's memory of that event."
It's easy to see how that effect could be misused, consciously or unconsciously, by, e.g., an overzealous prosecutor, or a social worker who has been caught up in a moral panic.
Notice that the imperfection of memory unavoidably implies the imperfection of a source of knowledge that many of us have tended to honor as a gold standard of evidence: eyewitness testimony. How many times have we seen eyewitness testimony cited, and accepted, as authoritative? How many people are sitting in prison, or moldering in the grave, due to eyewitness testimony?21343
But those who have the most experience with eyewitness testimony, such as professional investigators, learn to be way more skeptical about it than we average folks (although that doesn't necessarily stop them from invoking it when they want to convict someone). They know from experience that multiple witnesses--even sane and honest ones—will often give divergent accounts of the same event. Even confessions can be inaccurate (5).
The considerable fallibility of memory, in and of itself, should decrease our estimation of the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, which, after all, is just a report of a memory. Thus it can be no more trustworthy than memory at best. But on top of that, there are other factors which decrease the dependability of eyewitness testimony.
Around 1990, well-known skeptical investigator James Randi and his associates were wondering what in the world people got from spending their hard-earned money on paranormal practitioners. What was satisfying them so that they'd keep coming back, wallets open, for more? They requested and received from a client of prominent "spirit medium" Maureen Flynn an audio recording of an actual session. This customer declared himself well-satisfied, saying that Flynn had proffered about half a dozen names during the session, all of which were names (or in some cases just close to the names) of his deceased loved ones.
21344
Then Randi told him what they'd heard on the recording of the session. Flynn had, in fact, mentioned thirty-seven names--the vast majority rejected as misses by the client himself--and had also asked him if he "connected with" any names beginning with "n" or "l"! She would say something like "Mary...I'm picking up the name Mary. Is that someone you know?" If told it wasn't, she'd then say something like, "Margie then; it must be Margie. Does that name ring a bell?" Using this "cold reading (https://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm)" technique, she'd eventually stumbled upon nine names the client endorsed as being his deceased loved ones'--or just close. And even that was a stretch, as in one case the name was of a distant relative he'd hardly known, and in another, a neighbor's dog! Upon being told the name was a "hit", she'd then deliver a typical client-satisfying message about how great the afterlife is and how much the dead relative loves him.
Somehow this man's memory had transformed this tawdry, stumbling, dishonest process into a satisfying wonderment (6). It's interesting to note here the extreme degree of distortion in the memory. A (probably causative) relationship between certain emotional needs and the memory distortion is apparent.
Add to that other factors that can distort eyewitness testimony, such as delusion, hallucination, misinterpretation of perceptions, sleight of hand, and plain old lying, and the credibility we attribute to it ought to dwindle even more.
For example, let's look at misinterpretation of perceptions, a foible we're all more subject to than we think. In a discussion of lake monsters, investigator Joe Nickell says, "You get something called 'expectant attention' - which means that, once you get the idea that there's a monster in the lake, almost anything you see, whether it's a floating log, or otters swimming in a line, looks like a multi-humped creature." (7) Elsewhere, (8) he recounts this true tale:
"Consider, for example, the experience of a senior wildlife technician with New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, Jon Kopp. As he explained to me, it had been dark and he was in a duck blind on a lake in Clinton County. Suddenly, he saw, heading toward him, a huge, snake-like monster swimming with a sinuous, undulating motion. As it came closer, however, Kopp realized that he saw not one creature but half a dozen—a group of otters swimming in a line diving and resurfacing to create the effect of a single, serpentine creature. “After seeing this,” Kopp said, “I can understand how people can see a ‘sea serpent’”..."
21349
We're not accustomed to looking at our experiences phenomenologically—that is, carefully distinguishing what we're actually perceiving from the layers of assumption and interpretation we immediately overlay. Another example: years ago I worked at a mental hospital in an old building, the basement of which was not used much anymore. There was a persistent "ghost story" about a mysterious light that could be seen through the basement window, moving around in there. I saw that spooky light myself one night! But instead of assuming it was a light inside the basement, I considered the idea that it may be a light from elsewhere reflected on the window. Using the Law of Mirrors (angle of incidence equals angle of reflection), I visually followed the sight-line to the real source: a light in a nearby parking lot. Wavy imperfections in the old glass of the window caused the reflected light to appear to move around as one walked past. An eyewitness who reported a light moving around in the basement, as opposed to a reflection on the window glass, would be tainting the facts with a layer of automatic interpretation without even knowing it—as we all do frequently.
21346https://img820.imageshack.us/img820/204/dixs.png 22932I'll close with the true story that first showed me the undependability of eyewitness testimony. In 1978 a panda escaped from the Rotterdam Zoo. Officials issued a media alert, and soon panda sightings were coming in from all over the Netherlands—around a hundred in all. As it turned out, the panda had gotten only a very short distance from the zoo before being killed by a train (9)! With no reason to believe there were any other pandas running around the Netherlands, how can we account for those hundred eyewitness reports? What does this example teach us about the accuracy of eyewitness reports in general? And if both memory and eyewitness reports are way less credible than we like to think, how much can we reasonably say we know, and to what degree of certainty?
The crowning irony here is that, for years, I remembered that story as being about an escaped kangaroo, not an escaped panda! It was only as I was writing this essay, when an Internet search failed to find the kangaroo story and I finally tracked down the panda story, that my all-too-human memory was refreshed.
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/ImagesforMembers/DixonCroppedSmall.jpg
About Dixon: I'm a hopeful monster, committed to laughter, love, and the Golden Rule. I see reason, applied with empathy, as the most important key to making a better world. I'm a lazy slob and a weirdo. I love cats, kids, quilts, fossils, tornadoes, comic books, unusual music, and too much else to mention. I’m a former conservative Christian, then New Ager, now a rationalist, skeptic and atheist. I've won awards for my short fiction, short humor, and poetry (both slam performances and "old school")--as well as this column! Lately I’m a Workshopping Editor at the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form (That’s right!). I’m job-hunting too, mostly in the Human Services realm. Passions: Too many -- Reading, writing, critical thinking, public speaking, human rights, sex and sensuality, arts and sciences, nature. Oh, and ladies, I’m single ;^D
NOTES
1. https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?89817-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-13-The-Tangled-Web-of-Lies (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?89817-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-13-The-Tangled-Web-of-Lies)
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?95075-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-14-Onward-Through-the-Fog! (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?95075-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-14-Onward-Through-the-Fog%21)
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showthread.php?96222-Article-The-Gospel-According-to-Dixon-15-Are-You-Certain&p=163092#post163092
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique Accessed on 4/5/13.
3. Disputed Memories (2004/02 ed.). The Hague: Health Council of the Netherlands. 2004-01-27. ISBN 905545123.
4. Loftus EF & Palmer JC (1974). "Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory". Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 13: 585.
5. Some examples of false confessions and other false eyewitness testimony that immediately come to mind (because I recently saw these two documentary movies) involve the "West Memphis 3" and "Central Park 5" cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Memphis Accessed on 4/5/13.
https://entertainment.time.com/2013/01/08/qa-the-central-park-five-on/ Accessed on 4/5/13.
6. Verbal report from James Randi at the CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) conference at the Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley/Oakland hills, May, 1991.
7. https://www.scifidimensions.com/Mar01/jnf_crypto.htm Accessed on 4/5/13. Other animals which sometimes swim in single file at the surface so that groups of them may be mistaken for one much larger creature include some types of sharks, dolphins, and whales.
8. Radford, Benjamin, and Joe Nickell. 2006. Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 38 Referenced in https://www.csicop.org/sb/show/lake_monster_lookalikes/ Accessed on 4/5/13.
9. Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 43.