When Our Memories are Both Vivid and Wrong

January 2017

Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior and Criminology, Law and Society, is featured in The Wall Street Journal for her research on memory as the author goes into detail regarding the accuracy behind 'flashbulb' memories.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Scientists have long known that memory is unreliable. It isn’t like a video recorder, storing events faithfully for the future, as the experimental psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, likes to say. What we remember is usually based on what actually happened—but tainted by related information that we might have acquired days or even years later. We might talk over the event with friends, for example, mingling their own memories with our own. We might read about it. We might see a movie and subtly incorporate parts of the film into what we think we experienced firsthand.

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