Various factors affect distortions of memory. These include schemas, source amnesia, the information effect, the hindsight bias, and the overconfidence effect. Schemas serve as mental models of events or objects that comprise of knowledge, anticipations, and beliefs. Source amnesia entails people fail to remember initial information correctly. The misinformation effect prevails when the recollections of events by individuals are disported by the information offered to them once the event takes place. The hindsight bias refers to the tendency of interpreting the past in a manner that matches the present situation. The overconfidence effect entails the tendency whereby persons need to overestimate their capacity to allow them remember events in a correct way (Loftus & Davis, 2006) .
From the factors influencing and creating memory distortions, schemas serve as among them. They create memory distortions based on the manner in which individuals place past activities to prevailing representations of the world to allow their memories remain more coherent and shape their memories or expectations. Schemas create distortions because individuals might think they remember thing, which did not actually take place since the things are in their schema (Loftus & Davis, 2006) . For example, for individuals who always purchase peanut butter in aisle four, while a new grocery store positions the peanut butter in aisle three, they might encounter challenges in remembering the location of the aisle having the peanut butter. The schemas of the individuals might say aisle four while the store manager says a different thing (Schacter, Guerin, & Jacques, 2011) .
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
When it comes to memory distortions in the context of eyewitness testimony, three major consequences become apparent. Firstly, the court might consider reserving the earlier decision as well as criminal charges. Secondly, individuals might be charged with obstruction of justice or perjury. Thirdly, the individuals availing distorted information might be sentenced to prison for offering false or misleading information (Lacy & Stark, 2013) .
References
Lacy, J. W., & Stark, C. E. (2013). The neuroscience of memory: Implications for the courtroom. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14 (9), 649–658.
Loftus, E. F., & Davis, D. (2006). Recovered memories. Annual Reviews of Clinical Psychology, 2 , 469–498.
Schacter, D. L., Guerin, S. A., & Jacques, P. L. (2011). Memory distortion: an adaptive perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15 (10), 467–474.
