CLASS PERCEPTION AND COGNITION

CLASS: PERCEPTION AND COGNITION Herman Ebbinghaus (1885) wrote about memory and addressed issues such as how do we remember some things and apparently not others. He distinguishes a group of mental states which once present in consciousness return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will; that is, they are reproduced involuntarily....as more exact observation teaches us, the occurrence of these involuntary reproductions is not an entirely random and accidental one. On the contrary they are brought about through the instrumentality of other, immediately present mental images. Any memory is liable to distortion and is a result of many different processes such as age, decay in the brain, displacement and interference. To distort something is to misrepresent something when retrieving it from memory. A good example is shown in eye - witness testimonies where facts and statements can become distorted and put out of context. Patients who have suffered head trauma tend to have distortions of m! emory depending on the part of the brain that has been injured. They sometimes fabbricate or confabulate when trying to recall past events or experiences. Eyewitness testimony is a much debated subject in psychology. In court, juries have believed the eye witness and sent innocent people to jail on account of hearing one testimony. In one case there were eight other witnesses testifying that the accused were with them. The jury then went away and found the two men guilty even after the victim of the attack admitted that he saw his assailants only briefly. One may suppose that an eyewitness, on observation of an event that would not be part of everyday life, like a crime, would notice much more and be able to remember it much better when asked to r