By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
Without looking at the back of your laptop or phone, which of the images above is the true Apple logo? You probably see it every day, many times if you are in offices or airports. It is considered one of the most recognizable logos in the world. But which version is correct? In a 2014 study (Blake, Nazarian & Castel, 2014), 85 UCLA students were asked to pick the true logo from the choices above, and 84 picked the wrong image. And it wasn’t due to a lack of familiarity: Fully 75 of those students owned Apple products, and 52 of them exclusively used Apple computers and handhelds. Asked beforehand, the students were very confident that they knew what the logo looks like, but all but one of them were unable to pick the right logo out of the lineup.
Why? Because memory is functional rather than photographic. If “knowing” the Apple logo meant having a complete image of it in our heads, then it would be easy enough to pick out the right one. But memory doesn’t rely on images. Instead it relies on the “gist,” for lack of a better word, of what is represented. We know it is an apple, and we know that it is stylized, and that it is a negative (white-space) image. But we don’t necessarily know where the bite is, whether the leaf leans left or right, and whether there is a divot in the bottom of the apple or not. Why not? Because we don’t need to remember that in order to remember the image. We tend to believe that experience equals knowledge and that confidence equates to greater certainty. But according to study author Dr. Alen Castel, it doesn’t. “There was a striking discrepancy between participants’ confidence prior to drawing the logo and how well they performed on the task. People’s memory, even for extremely common objects, is much poorer than they believe it to be.” Witnesses and others carry that same flawed memory into court. Where jurors might expect memories to be either pristine photographs or to be nonexistent, the truth often lies somewhere in between: a gist that is remembered for functional reasons, but not the specifics. We remember what is important, but that sense of importance can be idiosyncratic or unreliable. In this post, I’ll look at what that means for witnesses and witness examination.
We have all heard of the idea of a “photographic memory,” where some individuals are believed to be able to snap a mental image of anything — a scene or the page of a book — and store it for later examination. However, that notion of photographic memory has never been definitely proven to exist. Instead, we all have a kind of “photographic” memory only in the sense that our memory for visual content is more detailed than our memory of other material. Still, what we are relying on is highly-processed reconstructions that are heavy on some details and light or absent on other details.
That selectivity is driven by perceived importance. The best example of that is the “gun effect” that relates to eyewitnesses. In an armed confrontation, the witnesses can end up having very fuzzy memories of faces, clothing, or other details. Why? Because they were staring at the barrel of a gun. In more normal contexts, that functional focus can end up being surprising. The study authors note that we have difficulty identifying the correct locations for features on a dollar bill or a penny. “Explicit memory,” they note, “is also poor for items that people interact with daily, such as the keypads of calculators, telephones, computer keyboards, the layout of frequently-used elevator buttons, and aspects of road signs.” We wouldn’t remember those specific features because we don’t need to remember them in order to use the items.
The fact that memory is driven by function provides a few reminders for witness testimony.
Jurors (And Witnesses) Can Be Too Absolute About Memory
Either you remember it or you don’t. When we think of memory as a picture in our heads, it can be tempting to implicitly hold that all-or-nothing view. When the attorney asks, “Do you have a recollection of Ms. Smith?” the answer, for Ms. Smith’s treating physician for example, probably falls somewhere along a spectrum from “everything” to “nothing.” It helps to ground your answer if you place it somewhere on that spectrum: “I do not independently recall everything about her and her treatment, but I do have a very general recollection of her as a patient.”
So Justify Why You Recall
Sometimes remembering too much can be suspicious. After all, when the doctor sees hundreds or even thousands of patients in a month, why would she remember that particular one. Remembering that memory is functional helps to suggest an answer:
Because it was an unusual outcome.
Because I reviewed the charts afterward and that refreshed my recollection.
And Justify Why You Don’t
In other situations, remembering too little can be suspicious. In the likely event that a treating physician has no direct recall of a patient, that needs to be acknowledged without guilt: “That was two years ago, and I have seen a great many patients since then.” When parts of the interaction are recalled, but some other details are not, then justify the difference: “My focus was on caring for the patient, so while I am sure that I had discussions with the family members in the waiting room, I don’t remember those discussions at this point.”
By the way, on the logo choices above, the correct one is ‘B.’
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Other Posts on Memory:
- With Computers and Witnesses, Expect Memory Errors
- Treat Memory as Reconstruction
- Don’t Mistake the Witness for a Bucket of Facts
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Blake, A. B., Nazarian, M., & Castel, A. D. (2015). The Apple of the mind’s eye: Everyday attention, metamemory, and reconstructive memory for the Apple logo. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68(5), 858-865.
Image Credit: Study stimulus (Blake, Nazarian & Castel, 2014) with title added.