Hugo Münsterberg (1908/1925)
He is known for being the pioneer of applied psychology in law, medicine and education. When he was getting his doctoral degree at University of Leipzig he was under the guidance of Wilhelm Wundt. Was the president of APA in 1897 and was in charge of the experimental psychology lab at Harvard were he would spend the rest of his career. His work that he did about how psychology is applied in different fields would influence years of research.
There are different types of memory
The types of memory have changed over the years but there are still types of memory that revolve around the things that he mentioned: echoic memory and haptic memory.
There are many points, for instance, in which the results seem still contradictory
There is still conflicting evidence about this topic and how well the memories of events hold up over time. Some say that memory is like a game of telephone, it constantly changing, and some say it stays the same and you can remember everything about an event.
psychological experiment
The outcome of this experiment is that among most of the participants there were intrusion errors which is when there are certain things that are recalled that were never there to being with. For them to remember a hat but there being no hat all is one of the major example of this.
My other two blunders clearly arose under the influence of suggestion. The police and every one about the house had always taken as a matter of course that the entrance was made by a cellar window, as it would have been much more difficult to use the locked doors. I had thus never examined the other hypothesis, and yet it was found later that they did succeed in removing the lock of a door.
This show another reason why eye witness testimonies aren't reliable in court. This is also another example of illusion of truth.
Words were put into the mouths or men who had been [p. 51] silent spectators during the whole short episode; actions were attributed to the chief participants of which not the slightest trace existed; and essential parts of the tragi-comedy were completely eliminated from the memory of a number of witnesses.
This is an example of selective attention which was found in 1964 by Anne Treisman. Selective attention is still very important in cognitive psychology today and is still widely studied.
the psychologist is still a stranger ther
This has changed a lot over the years. Psychology in general is very present in the court room, wither its for elevations or behavioral profiling. Behavioral profiling was first used in the Jake the Ripper case but didn't gain traction until the late 20th century.
But he is expected to make up his mind as to whether the memory ideas of a witness are objective reproductions of earlier experience or are mixed up with associations and suggestions
When eye witness testimony is used there is a lot of uncertainties that surround it. These issues haven't been as in prominent in the past because there wasn't research that was against the use of eye witness testimonies. However with the knowledge that we now know about false memory and bias, it shows that the mind can't always be trusted when trying to recall information especially when it comes to the justice system.
My imagination gradually substituted the more usual method of packing with wrapping paper,
This could be seen as him filling in the blanks but when discussing cognitive psychology it can be seen as illusion of truth. Which stems from implicit memory and it's when the thing that seems more familiar is the more plausible answer. It made more sense for the clock to be wrapped in wrapping paper because it might of been before so that is what his memory remembers.
had rushed in from the seashore as soon as the police notified me, in the fear that valuable contents of the house might have been destroyed or plundered
This point is also what a lot of research is later based on. Being told that his house was just broken into can lead to the misremembering of details and could be seen has a form of priming. Priming would be introduce around the 1970s-1980s
statements was wrong
As years have past, there has been an increased number of eye witness testimonies that has been proven wrong. The reason of why has been examined to great length by the information that is available to us now about the cognitive processes.