experiment 2

• In the second experiment

  -they wanted to find out if the participants’ memories really had been distorted by the verbal label.
• What was the method

  -similar procedure was used whereby 150 student participants viewed a short (one minute) film which contained a 4 second scene of a multiple car accident and were then questioned about it.
• there were

  -three conditions, and the independent variable was manipulated by the wording of the question.
• 50 of the ppts were asked

  -'How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’

  -50 were asked "smashed"

  -50 were not interrogated about the speed of the vehicles
• A week later they were asked the critical question

  -did you see any broken glass

  -there was infact no broken glass in the film
• What were the findings

  -a higher proportion recalled seeing glass when smashed was used over hit
• Loftus and Palmer propose that there are two sources of info available to us about an event

  -The event – what we saw at the time​

  -Post-event information – supplied by the question containing hit or smashed.
• Overtime these two sources of info

  -integrate into another.

  -Those in the “smashed” condition believe the crash to have been more severe than it was and therefore assume that broken glass must have been present.

  -This is referred to the reconstructive hypothesis.