Thinker · TH-0143
Elizabeth Loftus
Elizabeth Loftus is an American cognitive psychologist who worked at the University of Washington and later the University of California, Irvine. Her experiments on…
Also known as Elizabeth F. Loftus
b. 1944 · Los Angeles; Seattle; Irvine, California
Traditions: American
Elizabeth Loftus is an American cognitive psychologist who worked at the University of Washington and later the University of California, Irvine. Her experiments on the misinformation effect showed that information encountered after an event can alter what people remember, and that confident memories can be wholly or partly constructed. Her research has been influential in debates over eyewitness testimony and contested in debates over recovered memories.
Key ideas
- Memory is reconstructive rather than a fixed record.
- Misleading information after an event can alter later memory of it.
- Confidence in a memory is no guarantee of its accuracy.
- Eyewitness testimony needs to be weighed with knowledge of memory's fallibility.
Major works
- "Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction" (1974, with John Palmer)
- Eyewitness Testimony (1979)
- The Myth of Repressed Memory (1994, with Katherine Ketcham)
In the conversation
- Discussion Sincere and mistaken: what the memory research means for how we listen to victims
- Discussion “I know what I saw”: what is a witness actually claiming?
On the map
The questions in The Coordinates of Thought where Elizabeth Loftus takes a place.
- 2.2.3 Memory Is remembering a kind of perceiving, or a kind of imagining?