After I studied the perception in the chapter 3, I realized that I had similar experience with Crystal while I was driving. In the textbook, when Crystal was running along the beach she saw different items at different points (Goldstein, 2011). Her experience told us that perception could be easily manipulated and changed by other factors or stimulus. And I had the same experience during driving. When I was driving, I saw a black item on the mid of the road far away. When I drove closer, I thought that was a piece of black wood. However, my perception changed while I was driving even more closer. I eventually found out that was the corpse of an animal. That experience illustrate that “perception involves dynamic processes that accompany and support our actions”(Goldstein, 2011).

There are two type of processing involved for perception. One is the bottom-up processing, the other is top-down processing. Bottom-up processing is that perception direct cognition. Your sensation forms perception and thus directs your cognition. In contract, top-down processing is mainly the perception constructed by cognition. Perception is formed by pervious conceptualized experience without your personal sensation. And the top-down processing is major reason why we have optical illusion.

And optical illusion is the major reason why we cannot always trust our visual perception. At certain viewpoint, illusion creates regularity that never seemed in the real world. However, certain perception cannot be trusted and might cause a disaster in the real world. For instance, daily news stated that dozens of truck crashes is due to optical illusion from an Altanta freeway intersection (Gordon, J. 2015). And the optical illusion is simply created by “one lane of highway on the driver’s right that goes straight”(Gordon, J. 2015). When people didn’t see the curve, and the traffic flow straight, people will simply use top-down processing. If traffic flows straight ahead, according to conceptual logic, the lane must be straight ahead. And thus, a simply optical illusion is created and cause more than 10 truck rollovers in past few months on this road. Of course, there are also other factors that might cause the accidence, I think the illusion created by perception is the major reason why so many accidences happens on that road.

At the end, I hope everyone can realize sometimes the visual perception cannot be trusted because of the optical illusion created by top-down processing of perception. Since everyone has already learned the perception concept, I hope everyone can utilize the knowledge into daily life. And keep remembering; don’t always trust your eye!

Reference:

Gordon, J. (2015, May 4). The Atlanta freeway interchange where dozens of crashes have occurred because it’s designed with an OPTICAL ILLUSION. Retrieved June 29, 2015, from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3066426/The-Atlanta-freeway-interchange-dozens-crashes-occurred-s-designed-OPTICAL-ILLUSION.html

Goldstein, E. Bruce. “Perception.” Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. 3rd ed. Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. 48-64. Print.

http://gawker.com/unarmed-people-of-color-killed-by-police-1999-2014-1666672349

These are faces.  Faces of those that have been killed by violence at the hand of police officers.  They were unarmed and not dangerous.  Yet, they are dead.  Dead for no reason at all and their death: justified.  The killing of African Americans almost seems to be a pattern as it pertains to the reason why they were killed in the first place.  Were they perceived deemed to be a threat?  Did perception get the best the officers that killed these individuals?  Do perceptual differences exist when it comes to African Americans as opposed to other races, therefore leading to the uptick in violence toward African Americans?

The theory of unconsciousness suggests that perceptions are the result of unconscious assumptions that we make about the environment.  The media has, on every occasion, portrayed the African American community as a threat to other communities. Joshunda Sanders from the Maynard media Center on Structural Inequality (2012) writes, “Perpetuation of them as dangerous has been embedded in American society not only by words and images projected by journalists but also by a wide variety of other media and entertainment sources, including the Internet, movies and video games.” (para. 2)  These portrayals create top down processing or prior knowledge or expectations.  African Americans are often judged based on hearsay by people outside of the African American community.

Additionally, not only do media portrayals show African Americans as dangerous, but parallels are drawn to that of animals, in particular apes. Jennifer Eberhardt, professor of psychology at Stanford University (2011), points out that there are “visual and audio perception studies that reveal implicit associations between Blacks and apes. These associations can lead to justifications of violence toward Blacks and decreases in concern about racial inequalities.” (para. 2) These inequalities have derived from stereotypical judgements that are most common in the African American community.  How often so we see African Americans in the media in a positive light?

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/11/study-hairless-middle-aged-apes-still-middle-aged-apes

Furthermore, at what age does this perception begin? African Americans are not given the benefit of the doubt as are Caucasians, when it comes to the majority of situations, even in childhood.  In an article titled The essence of innocence: Consequences of dehumanizing black children (2014), Goff, Jackson, Culotta, Di Leone and DiTomassa hypothesize ”converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers” (p. 526). As a mother with two African American boys, I feel that I have to be more cautious of the way people perceive my children, even though I know that my children are no danger to anyone.  Unfortunately, the inaccurate perceptions of them being a threat could end up being the story of their lives.

Lastly, if the idea of perception is the ability to do something or act in a certain situation, then I would conclude that perceptual differences do exist when it comes to African Americans as opposed to Caucasians, therefore leading to the uptick in violence toward African Americans.  Perceptual Salience can, at most times can cause this fundamental attribution error.  That is, the focus is strictly on the individuals and not the situations that are within the communities.  It is easy to blame the individual for a circumstance rather than distribute the blame and sympathize that the surroundings could be the cause.  Other times, correspondence bias, the idea that African Americans are simply a threat, can also take hold in the minds of outside communities.

References

Goff, P., Jackson, M., Culotta, C., Di Leone, B., Di Tomasso, N. (2014). The Essence of Innocence:   Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 106(4), 526-545. doi: 10.1037/a0035663

Perlberg, A. (2011, July). The continued dehumanization of blacks. Retrieved from The Stanford University, Stanford, California, The Clayman Institute for Gender Research website: http://Stanford.edu/news/2011/continued-dehumanization-blacks

Sanders, J. (2012, May). Media portrayals of black youths contribute to racial tensions.  Retrieved from:http://www.mije.org/mmcisi/general/mediaportrayalofblackyouthcontributetoracialtensions

Perceiving Size: The Space Needle

In Downtown Seattle Washington, a vast array of buildings stretch vertically to the sky, elaborately decorating a hilly waterline against the backdrop of the Cascade mountain range in the Pacific Northwest.  Sitting unaccompanied by any other structures is a building that stands out in shape from all others in the area.  This building is the space needle.  When viewed online or in books and on movies and television shows, the space needle is shown from the north dwarfing the rest of the skyline in the background.  The following is just a brief example of perceiving size and my analysis of this illustration pertaining to the perceptual system.

I grew up in Washington State and spent most of my youth there.  I lived across the water from Seattle and often took ferry rides from Bainbridge Island to the terminal downtown.  When taking this approach from the west I could clearly view the space needle and its actual size in relation to the others buildings downtown.

The space needle is the small, stand alone structure on the far left of the photo.  This view, which is almost parallel from the skyline, clearly demonstrates the actual size in comparison to the rest of the skyline.  Like I mentioned earlier, when viewed on television and in art and literature, the space needle is shot from the north.  Making it appear massive against the buildings in the background.  This is because the space needle is closer to me than the buildings in the background.

When considering the process of perceptual information, starting with an individual’s previous knowledge of a particular situation or, top-down processing; (Goldstein) when perceiving size, you have to take into account that the size of the object you’re viewing will appear to shrink when it increases in distance from your position.  An example of this being the buildings in the background of the photo above.  Though it may appear that the space needle is taller than the rest, it is actually not even in the top five of the tallest buildings in Seattle (Kendle).  In another photo, the view from this position appears to show the space needle as the same size as the largest building in the background.  These examples show how movement facilitates perception and size consistency (Goldstein).  When I approach the ferry terminal downtown, it is directly underneath the axis of the skyline.  So I am up close and able to get a great view of how big the buildings really are.  When I look north I can see how small the space needle really is.  When I travel north and turn around I see the space needle as everyone else does on television and in magazines and movies.  Mount Rainier off to the right of the picture adds even a little bit more to this perspective.

When everywhere we look we see vertical and horizontal lines, it’s no wonder why the oblique effect (Goldstein) is so prevalent in our environment.  We are constantly conditioned to these physical regularities (Goldstein) throughout life.  This experience dependant plasticity (Goldstein), for me, was shaped all my life staring at the skyline of downtown Seattle and the space needle.

Citations:

Goldstein, E. Bruce. “Perception.” Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. 3rd ed. Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. 52-54. Print.

Kendle, Kristin. “Top 10 Tallest Buildings in Seattle.” Web. 27 June 2015. <http://seattle.about.com/od/seattle-attractions/tp/Tallest-Buildings-In-Seattle.htm>.

“Seattle Skyline – Google Search.” Seattle Skyline – Google Search. Web. 30 June 2015.

I find chapter 3 on perception fascinating because we all mostly have the same means of sensing our environment but we don’t always have the same way of perceiving it. The term that stuck out to me the most while reading this chapter was mirror neurons. They are neurons that fire as if you were performing a task that you observed someone else perform.

I had heard it before on a Psych show from Netflix. A man set up a table with a divider. Someone would sit at the table with both arms extended out on the table, but one would be on the other side of the divider, out of sight. The experimenter would put a fake hand on the table, in place of the missing one, with a sleeve leading up to the shoulder of the hidden arm. So, here comes the fun part: he would prime the person by running a soft brush up and down the fingers of both the real and fake hands in a synchronized manner. He then took out a hammer and hit the fake hand very quickly and the person would be stunned for a moment, feeling as if their real hand had just been smashed by a hammer.

I love this example because their reactions were priceless, and I believe it is a perfect demonstration of not only mirror neurons, but also audiovisual mirror neurons I haven’t been through that experiment, but I have a bit of an idea of how it might feel. I have a very hard time watching a lot of those “funny accident” videos on YouTube showing skateboarding accidents and other accidents where people get injured because sometimes it’s as if I can feel their pain. Other times, mirror neurons can be a great thing because you can also feel very strong emotions on the other end of the spectrum. A couple months ago I watched a video of men in the service coming home to their loved ones (I don’t suggest watching it right before you go to bed because you won’t be able to stop crying) and it was such an amazing feeling. I was sobbing, the snotty kind.

Mirror Neurons are just one of the really cool aspects of psychology that links us all to each other. It’s a big reason why we are able to empathize with others, and I cannot wait to learn more about this topic.

It is common knowledge that we all have the ability to perceive our environment using our senses.  Information from the environment is taken in by our various sensory organs and interpreted by our brain to give us an image of the conditions in which we exist.  This is known  as bottom-up processing.  However it is a less known fact that our brain does not objectively analyze the information it receives and present it solely as that data was provided.  Rather our brain interprets that data in certain ways, based on our experiences and preconceived beliefs, causing us to view the world in certain ways that allow for easier understanding of our world but not in ways that are always accurate.  This is known as top-down processing, and this manner of our mind affecting our environment is the basis of many interesting phenomena and illusions.

In the environment top-down processing can be seen in many aspects of our lives.  The most basic examples can be seen in many books devoted to optical illusions.  Just about any sort of artwork relies on this to convey a portrait, particularly those of a more abstract sort.  Top-down processing occurs in many scenarios in everyday life as well.  For example, while we may not think about it, when we view certain objects that we cannot see the whole of, while we may not actually see them, we have already formed a belief of what the unviewed parts look like.  If we cannot see the second half of a tree branch behind a tree, we usually have an idea of what it looks  like based on our previous experiences with such objects.  This can be used to hide certain less desireable items, and is the basis behind certain actions such as turning the stained side of the pillow face down, or making the best fruit in the grocery store the most readily viewed.

Memory is fundamental to all our lives. Without memory of the past we cannot function in the present or even begin to think about the future. We would not be able to recall what we did yesterday, what we have done today or what we intend to do tomorrow. Without memory we would not be able to learn. Memory requires processing lots of information. This information is encoded in many different forms, such as images, sounds or meaning. Encoding is the process of acquiring information and transferring it into memory (Goldstein 2011). It is important to understand that memory is broken down into three stages of information processing encoding, storage and retrieval. Many people perceive that lack of memory is related to lack of intelligence. Instead it is primarily related to the encoding process.

The best way to improve our encoding process is to link, associate or connect the incoming information with something already in our memory in order to make it meaningful. This can be done with visualization or guided imagery techniques. If we can learn how to better encode information, we would be able to overall improve our memory storage. Some people are better at storing memory visually (pictures) while others more acoustically (sound). The important thing is to learn it the way that works for you. People often get caught up in thinking there’s a “one size fits all” learning style for memorizing new material. This is simply not the case. Different people prefer different methods for taking in new information. Use the style that works for you, even if it’s not the way most people study or try and learn new information. Some people like to write things down when they’re learning something new. Others may benefit more from recording what they’re hearing, and going back to take more detailed notes later. The point is to figure out how we best encode information that works in our own mind.

Personally I am a visual learner and retain information best through visualization. The best way for me to learn while in school is to write things down and to visualize the pen writing on the paper so I can look through my memory storage to find the answers. This way I rely on my visualization strength and not try and learn things on my acoustic weakness knowing my visual (picture) encoding is more efficient. Sometimes we have to test ourselves to determine what is our preferred way to encode information. For me my biggest challenge is to remember names of people I have just met when they introduce themselves acoustically. Because I can’t write down the person’s name that introduced themselves to me I can’t visualize picture the name in my memory. By improving my acoustic encoding process I try and remember that persons name by repeating it multiple times in my mind. In order to leverage my visualization strength I need to picture the name in my mind making it more meaningful.

The way we encode information is crucial and directly proportionate to how much we remember in our memory storage short or long term. By understanding how our individual minds work best to encode information will greatly impact the amount of information we will be able to retain or store in our memory. So is our lack of memory really related to our lack of intelligence?

8 Tips for Improving Your Memory. (n.d.). Retrieved June 30, 2015, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/09/03/8-tips-for-improving-your-memory/

Memory, Encoding Storage and Retrieval | Simply Psychology. (n.d.). Retrieved June 30, 2015, from http://www.simplypsychology.org/memory.html

Vanhorn, D., & Francis, G. (2011). CogLab Manual [to accompany] Cognitive Psychology: Mind, research and everyday experience, Third edition, E. Bruce Goldstein. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

I am a generally anxious person and am easily overwhelmed so, that being said, though LEARNING how to drive did not scare me, others OBSERVING my driving was a great feat to overcome. My greatest fear when it came to driving was what I had assumed was lack of depth perception. Ever since I was a kid, if I were walking alongside someone they would have to push me away from them or remind me that I had been veering off of our course. Lack of balance and lack of depth perception are often misconceived as the other, and for several years the doctors thought the problem was my hearing, thus making me off balance due to the lack of equilibrium, but they were never entirely sure nor able to solve the issue.

While reading Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience  by Goldstein, B. (2011), I became suspicious of the true natural of issue. When participating in the perception of the two quarters, I became greatly aware of how poorly I saw with my non-dominant eye. Though we are privileged enough to be able to perceive depth even with just a single healthy retina, there are other techniques we use subconsciously do determine depth and those techniques are depth perception cues. Of them all I have satisfactory visualization of liner perspective, interposition, shadows, texture gradient, and size constancy but what I lack is the ability to recognize motion parallax, which is the phenomena that occurs when in a vehicle and you focus on an outside stationary object, at first it appears to be approaching slowly but when it passes you it seems to have gone by in a flash. My perception is altered in such a way that I cannot recognize and adjust my speed in such a manor to avoid stationary objects, in my case a fire hydrant.

Due to Cognitive Psychology I can identify and work on the potentional issues I may cause for myself and others. I am glad that I have been made aware of the sense of perception and the effect they have on us in the physical world. I hope all of the information on the topic is brought to light in far more useful settings than my car and a fire hydrant.

“What on earth is this crazy girl talking about” may be what is coursing through your mind right now, but in fact I too thought I was crazy when I was looking at a cloud of floating snow back when I was in Alaska. Research shows that perception can be based on experience but how much of our perception is influenced by our imagination? Even though my friend Samantha and I knew that all of our explanations for the giant mass of “white ice looking clouds” could not have possibly floated right through mountains, and landmass that is what we saw despite our disbelief. “Maybe its some sort of nitrogen gas” “better yet it could be a slow moving avalanche of snow “ but that couldn’t be right, how could snow penetrate a mountain? What was this mysterious being that we are encountering and why is it that we have never seen anything like it before?

A million questions and images play through our mind when we are looking at something for the first time in our life. I cannot imagine how it must be for an infant where virtually everything they encounter is new, how do newborn babies not lose their minds over all that new information and images ready to be processed. How do we make sense of something that seems to go against the nature… or what I should say is our own understanding of the nature of physics. Let me backtrack and allow you to witness what I saw that glorious day back in Alaska, but a warning, what I caught on film is nothing compared to the spectacle that I witnessed in person.

CLICK below link

Alaska

Maybe I am not crazy, according to the Association for Psychological Science; research shows that imagination can indeed influence perception. Studies done by Joel Pearson, Roseanna Rademaker, and Frank Tong are testing “mental imagery” (theory that mental image is a personal phenomenon) and whether people have accurate knowledge of their own imagery performance (Pearson, 2011). In the instance when I was deciding what the floating white mass was, I was able to differentiate the fact that what I saw and what I thought it could be we`re not the same thing. I knew that against my better judgment and of course coinciding with the laws of gravity and physics that all my theories and explanations were in fact irrational. It is because of this deductive reasoning that I assumed that the mass I was viewing must be fog, even though it did not look like any kind of fog that I have ever seen, what other explanation could there be. In that moment I was looking at something and choosing to believe it was something else entirely. That says a lot about perception, to me it is based on, experience, imagination, knowledge, and a bit of deductive reason. Seeing isn’t believing, seeing is merely a tool we use to arrive at a more educated conclusion.

Pearson J., Rademaker R.L., Tong F. (2011). Evaluating the mind’s eye: The metacognition of visual imagery. Psychological Science, 22(12), 1535-1542. doi:10.1177/0956797611417134

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/imagination-can-influence-perception.html

Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved optical illusions.  I remember one of the first ones I saw was a picture that could have either been a vase or two faces.  At first I saw the vase.  Afterwards I was told that some people saw two faces in the picture and at that point I was able to see them too.  I remember that blew my mind.  I thought it was amazing how one picture could look so much like one thing, but then if  I looked at it a different way, it could look like something completely different.  I was amazed that my brain could do this.

Well in the years that followed, I still loved optical illusions and perception tests, like the ones people post on Facebook.  For example, finding a baby’s face in a picture that looks like it is just a bunch of coffee beans.  There are so many more but I will not torture you by naming them all.   I always felt that I was pretty good at these, and felt that I had a pretty good grip on my perceptions of things.  Then one day a few months back, everything that I thought I knew about myself and how my brain worked, came into question.  It all started with that dress!  Oh I am sure you know what dress I am talking about, the one that is white and gold, or is it black and blue?  I saw this picture and I thought I knew for sure, it was white and gold.  That is what I see in this picture, I am absolutely positive, that dress is white and gold.

Source: http://gawker.com/what-color-is-this-goddamn-dress-1688330170

Well as it would turn out, I was completely wrong.  According to Wagner (2015), there was no debate, the British clothing company Roman, the manufacturer of the dress, lists the dress on their website as “royal blue.”   The dress is actually blue and black.  How in the world could I see blue and black as white and gold?   According to Johnson (2015), it all has to do with the way our eyes process light and then how that visual information is processed by our brain.  Now I know so far in our lesson about perception, we have not really delved into color processing, but this dress definitely had me thinking about how people perceive things differently.  In one of the articles I read, Rogers (2015) brings up the fact that this dress may hit some sort of perceptual boundary in people.  Starting from how we are wired to process information and our evolution to see daylight, and daylight changes color. Now I do not want to get into a whole lecture on how our brains perceive color or discuss the entire electromagnetic spectrum, it is just this week’s lesson on perception made me think about this dress.

I have learned that perception is determined by three sources of information.  The first is information that originates from stimulation of the receptors, or as we learned bottom up processing.  Second is any additional information to give us the context in how the object appears.  Third is our expectation or knowledge of this information as the perceiver, or top-down processing.  This idea that perception depending on additional information is what really made me think about this dress (Goldstein, 2011).  Honestly this dress controversy drove me crazy and at the time I did not care.  I felt it was ridiculous, I saw the dress as white and gold, and that was that.  This week’s lesson has me understanding and appreciating this dress and how it can make my brain perceive it to be white and gold.  This helped me to understand in a real life context of how both bottom-up and top-down processing works, especially on myself.  The bottom-up process, is that I recognized this is striped dress.  I feel with the exposure of this picture, my brain perceived it as white and gold, since it was lighter using the top-down process, since it is what I expected it to be, with the exposure.  This dress is just one example of how our senses are not as reliable as we think they are.  Sometimes the information we receive is deficient and our senses have to interpret this information the best they can.  Unfortunately our senses don’t always do a good job.  Sometimes we perceive or see what we expect or want to see and or perceive (Johnson, 2015).

I look back and think how funny it is, all the controversy this dress seemed to have caused.  Even though we all look at the dress and agree that it is a dress, the actual color of the dress can be interpreted differently by different people, all based on perceptions.  As I was writing this and looking at this dress more, I actually started to see it as blue and black, despite my believing it was white and gold.  It reminds me of the vase/two face picture.  I was amazed at my brain and how it could perceive one object in two different ways.  More importantly this dress has made me wonder how many other things I may have been wrong about, based purely on my perceptions.

Goldstein, E.B. (2011).  Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday            Experience, Third Ed. Belmont, CA. Wasdworth, Cengage Learning.

Hongo (2015, February 26). What color is the Goddamn [Web log comment]. Retrieved from http://gawker.com/what-color-is-this-goddamn-dress-1688330170

Johnson, D.K. (2015, February 27). The Blue/Black White/Gold Dress Controversy: No One Is           Right Everyone is wrong about what color the dress is; it’s no color at all. Psychology            Today, A Logical Take. Retrieved June 29. 2015 from:            https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/logical-take/201502/the-blueblack-whitegold-      dress-controversy-no-one-is-right

Rogers, A. (2015, February 26).  The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This           Dress.  Wired, Science. Retrieved from:  http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

Wagner, M. (2015, February 27). It’s ‘obviously’ a blue and black dress, says Caitlin McNeill, the    Scottish folk singer who started #TheDress Internet sensation.  New York Daily News.           Retrieved from:  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/woman-posted-dress-blue-article-1.2131402

Many of you may not be familiar with the story of Kirk Bloodsworth. Kirk Bloodsworth was a former marine and a native of Maryland, he was also the first American who was sentenced to death row to be exonerated by DNA. In 1985 Kirk Bloodsworth was found guilty of sexual assault, rape, and first-degree premeditated murder of a nine year old girl, and sentenced to death. Five eyewitnesses placed Kirk Bloodsworth near the victim, or near the crime scene during the time the crime had been thought to have occurred, ultimately eyewitness testimony is what convinced the jury to find Kirk Bloodsworth guilty of all charges. During his time in prison Kirk had maintained his innocence, it wasn’t until nine years after his conviction, that DNA found on the victim proved his innocence. Unfortunately he is not alone in the case of mistaken identity. How can this be? The answer is quite simple and it reverts to memory.

For a long time eyewitness testimony was used to convict the most dangerous criminals. “As of December 2009, the use of DNA testing has exonerated in the United States who were wrongfully convicted of crimes…Seventy-five percent of these convictions were based on eyewitness testimony.” (Quinlivan et al.2009; Scheck et al.2000) A 1998 study of Wells and Bradfield, showed that after viewing a videotape where a gunman was shown for 8 seconds, every participant picked the gunman out of a photo lineup although the picture of the actual gunman was not included in the photos shown. The reason why this happened is explained through the example of weapons focus, in this case the eyewitness focuses all of their attention on the weapon, therefore foregoing the details of the gunman’s face, which in turn leads them to identify the wrong person.

A few studies on false memory have shown that when presented with a certain event and given minor details, people are able to recall events that never happened. To further explain how that can happen during an investigation of a crime I will go back to a concept of a memory error, which is error due to familiarity. During this process a person is able to recall a face in the crowd at the time that a crime could have taken place, where an innocent bystander can become a suspect. For example the first eyewitness comes forward and most likely describes the actual criminal, a sketch is released to the public for a person of interest. In the case of Kirk Bloodsworth the sketch carries some similarity to his features. The second witness comes forward and says that they saw this man around the area where the crime occurred, along with the first eyewitness they make up a new sketch, which now resembles Kirk even more because the second eyewitness is describing Kirk. Now the third, fourth, and fifth eyewitness are convinced the person they saw was Kirk, and they testify in court against him. At this point Kirk Bloodsworth an innocent bystander is accused of a crime that he did not commit; lucky for him DNA had proved him innocent. I am sure there were others before DNA testing that were not so lucky.

In conclusion our memory can deceive us. We saw this effect in the False Memory CogLab. In the lab we recalled words that were associated with a given list of words but were not actually one of the words that we saw. This relates to false eyewitness testimony. The same way we are able to recall items that related to the words presented, an eyewitness gives a false testimony based on errors in memory. In most cases of false eyewitness testimony the falsely identified person and the actual assailant carried some similarity to one another like color of hair, wearing similar clothes at the time the crime occurred, or even driving same model car, this explains why the brain groups these occurrences together based on the similarities, which leads us to recall the wrong events.

Arkowitz, H. & Lilienfeld, O.S. (January,2009) Why science tells us not to rely on eyewitness accounts. Scientific American. Retrieved from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/?page=2

Summaries of 46 cases in which mistaken or perjured eyewitness testimony put innocent persons on death row. Retrieved from: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/StudyCWC2001A.pdf

Kirk Bloodworth – The Innocence Project. The Innocence Project: Cases of false imprisonment. Retrieved from: http://www.innocenceproject.org/cases-false-imprisonment/kirk-bloodsworth

Goldstein, E. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday  Experience. Third Edition. Belmont, CA. Cengage Learning