PS200 Unit 6 Memory Reliability Seminar Reflection Example

The Caller Who Was Certain: A PS200 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on How Far Memory Can Be Trusted

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS200: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the calls and the classmates are composite; the studies cited are real.

What I Believed Before the Seminar

Before our Unit 6 seminar, I would have said that the most reliable callers are the most certain ones. When a caller says without hesitation that a suspect drove a red pickup, I enter it with confidence. When a caller hesitates and says, I think it might have been red, I add a note that the description is uncertain. Confidence has always seemed like a reasonable guide, and in the rush of a call it is the only guide I have.

What the Seminar Showed

Our instructor began with Loftus and Palmer (1974). After viewing short crash films, participants judged vehicle speed from a question that used either hit or smashed. The smashed group gave faster estimates, and a week on, more of them said they had seen shattered glass that the films never showed. One word in a question had changed what people remembered.

A classmate who works as a paralegal then described a review by Wells and Olson (2003), which found that memory for events is shaped by stress, by what happens after the event and by how people are questioned, and that a witness's confidence after the fact can be inflated by feedback. The point that stopped me was that confidence can grow while accuracy does not.

My questions were not just collecting a caller's memory; they were taking part in shaping it.

Why Memory Works This Way

The instructor connected the eyewitness findings to what we had studied about encoding and retrieval in Unit 4. Memory is not stored like a video and played back; every act of remembering reassembles the episode from pieces, filling gaps with what seems likely, much as perception fills gaps in speech (Goldstein, 2019). Information that arrives after the event, including the wording of a question, can become part of the rebuilt memory, and the person cannot tell which parts came from the original experience. Seen this way, the Loftus and Palmer result is not a quirk. It is what a reconstructive memory system should do when someone supplies a strong word like smashed.

That explanation mattered to me because it removed the idea that misled witnesses are careless or dishonest. A caller who reports a detail I suggested is not lying. The detail has become part of what they remember, and they will defend it sincerely.

What I Recognized in My Own Work

I thought about how I ask questions. When a caller is unsure, I sometimes offer options: was it a car or a truck, was it dark or light? I do this to speed things up, but the seminar made me see that I may be supplying details the caller then remembers as their own. I also realized that when I repeat a description back and say, good, that is helpful, I may be raising the caller's confidence in a detail that started as a guess.

None of this means callers are unreliable. Most of what callers tell me is accurate, and responders depend on it. The seminar showed me that reliability depends partly on how I ask.

A Call From Last Spring

One call came back to me during the seminar. A man reported a hit-and-run outside a grocery store and said the driver was in a silver sedan. When I asked whether he saw a license plate, he said he thought it started with a 7. I said, great, a seven, that helps, and he then repeated the seven with more certainty when the deputy called him back. I never learned whether the seven was right. I do know that my reaction gave a guess the weight of a fact.

What I Will Change

Three changes follow. First, I will ask open questions before offering choices: what did the vehicle look like, before was it a car or a truck. Second, I will record the caller's own words for key details in quotation marks, rather than my paraphrase. Third, I will avoid praising specific details during the call, saving thanks for the end. Our center's protocol already favors open questions for some call types, and the seminar gave me the reason behind that rule.

The Question I Took Home

I cannot yet see how to balance open questions with speed when a caller is panicking and seconds matter. Open questions take longer, and some callers cannot answer them while upset. I would like to know whether research has looked at questioning under that kind of pressure.

References

Goldstein, E. B. (2019). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (5th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585-589. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3

Wells, G. L., & Olson, E. A. (2003). Eyewitness testimony. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 277-295. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145028