COGAPP - Loftus & Palmer (1974)

Question 1

aim

Answer 1

to investigate whether the use of leading questions would affect the estimation of speed

Question 2

participants

Answer 2

54 - 5 groups of 9

Question 3

what was shown

Answer 3

7 videos of traffic accidents (5-30 seconds)

Question 4

design

Answer 4

independent design

Question 5

procedure

Answer 5

after watching - asked to fill in a questionnaire about the accident
- one question being the critical question where they were asked to estimate the speed of the cars involved in the accident.

Question 6

question asked

Answer 6

were asked to estimate the speed of the cars
asked the same question but the critical question included different words. One group of participants was asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” The critical word hit was replaced by collided, bumped, smashed, or contacted in the other conditions.

Question 7

results

Answer 7

the mean estimates of speed were highest in the ‘smashed’ condition (40.8 mph) and lowest in the ‘contacted’ group (31.8 mph)

the critical word in the question consistently affected the participants’ answers to the question.

Question 8

reliaty of memory

Answer 8

the verb “smashed” activates a cognitive schema of a severe accident that may change the participant’s memory of the accident. This distortion of memory is based on reconstruction so that it is not the actual details of the accident that are remembered but rather what is in line with a cognitive schema of a severe accident. This interpretation is in line with Bartlett’s suggestion of reconstructive memory due to schema processing.

The results of this experiment can be interpreted in terms of Bartlett’s theory of reconstructive memory, i.e. people tend to change details of an event when they try to remember it. This is probably also what happened when the participants in Loftus and Palmer’s study tried to remember the original information when they were given information about the speed of the cars through the use of either ‘hit’ or ‘smashed’. The participants may have used their past knowledge of serious car accidents to make the decision of whether or not they had seen broken glass (schema processing).