ELIZABETH LOFTUS’S TED TALK

How reliable is your memory?

a. Complete the following excerpts with the missing words:

3’12 : So I was asked to work on Titus' case because I'm a psychological ________. I study
memory. I've studied memory for _______. And if I meet somebody on an -- this happened on
the way over to Scotland -- if I meet somebody on an airplane, and we ask each other, "What
do you do? What do you do?" and I say "I study memory," they usually want to tell me how
they have ___________ remembering names, or they've got a relative who's got_________ or
some kind of memory problem, but I have to tell them I don't study when people
_________. I study the ________: when they remember, when they remember things that
didn't happen or remember things that were ________ from the way they really were. I study
_______ _________.

4’46 : Like the jurors who convicted those ________ people and the jurors who convicted
Titus, many people believe that memory works like a ________ device. You just record the
___________, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or
identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't
________. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit
more like a _________ page: You can go in there and change it, but so can _________
______.

10’17 : In one of the first studies we did, we used ___________, a method inspired by the
___________ we saw in these cases, we used this kind of suggestion and planted a _______
___________ that when you were a kid, five or six years old, you were lost in a _________
_________. You were frightened. You were crying. You were ultimately rescued by an
elderly person and reunited with the family. And we ___________ in planting this memory in
the minds of about a __________ of our subjects.

b. 11’37. What ethical problem can these experiments cause? What does E. Loftus say
about this ?

c. 12’13. What happened when E. Loftus published her work suggesting that some kind
of therapy could alter the patients’ memories?

d. E. Loftus mentions one positive use of implanting a false memory : which one?