chris porcelain writes:
You've seen what you remember right? I don't see a difference.
There
is a difference, Chris. There are several reasons why you may not remember correctly what you saw.
First of all, when you witness something, you may not be able to see things clearly, or you may, for example, get the colours wrong because of monochrome streetlights. Thus you can become convinced that the murderer wore a yellow shirt, whereas, in daylight, it's a light blue shirt.
Then it may be the case that you are
interpreting what you see, depending on your state of mind. If you had witnessed the same scene in a different mindset or mood, you might have interpreted what you saw differently.
Afterward, when the memories start to fade, you may be mixing them up, interchanging persons and things in diverse scenes you've witnessed that may be a bit similar. You may unwittingly add elements to your memory that you haven't actually seen or heard, but which your common sense tells you must have been the case, even if in reality the scene you witnessed was one of those rare events where, by sheer coincidence, things go just a little different than common sense would have you expect. In the same way, elements may be removed entirely from memory. Still, you are convinced that this is how you saw things.
Another illustration of how memory can trick us, is the following experiment, described
here, by Susan Blackmore:
Stooges got into conversation with people and then, using clever choreography or distraction, were swapped for a completely different person. About half the time the person talking to them did not notice the substitution.
She gives the following reference for this:
Simons, D.J. and Levin, D.T. (1998) Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4, 644-649
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 01 March 2005 10:42 AM
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