The Reliability of Cognitive Processes — Reconstructive Memory and the Misinformation Effect

Because memory is reconstructive, it is also vulnerable to distortion. This has profound real-world consequences, particularly for eyewitness testimony in the legal system, where the accuracy of a witness's memory can determine whether a person is convicted or freed. Elizabeth Loftus is the researcher most associated with demonstrating how fragile and malleable memory can be. Her work shows that information introduced after an event, known as post-event information, can become woven into the original memory, altering what a person believes they saw. This phenomenon is called the misinformation effect.

The classic demonstration is Loftus and Palmer (1974). In their first experiment, participants watched film clips of car accidents and were then asked to estimate the speed of the vehicles. T