Schema Theory

Sigmund Freud was an austrian psychologist and the first one to use psychoanalysis, a method of investigating someones mind and the way one thinks. It is because of that we now understand the human behavior more and allowed many other psychologist to develop different psychological experiments. The Schema Theory or the schema is the system for understanding of how knowledge is represented and being used.
Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett was a british psychologist and specialized his work on cognitive psychology, especially remembering. One of his most famous experiment that he performed was in 1932, when he asked a couple of volunteers to read the story of "The War of Ghosts." The aim of this experiment was to investigate the way that memory stores meaningful information. The people who were part of the experiment were asked to recall the story repeatedly at different time time intervals.
Another famous psychologist is Elizabeth Loftus, who focused her main studies on how subsequent information can affect an eyewitness's account of an event. In her "Loftus and Palmer" experiment in 1974, people had to watch a short clip of a car cash and than take a test were she would ask random questions about the incident. 5 out of 6 of these questions are irrelevant, but the most important question was "About how fast were the cars going when they (hit, smashed, bumped, collided, contacted)?" The wording of this question at the end, determined the results of the test and most people scored differently on the test. The estimated speed was affected the verb used. The verb implied information about the speed, systematically affected the participant's memory of the accident.
At last I want to address the Ronald Cotton case, were an innocent teenager was accused for raping a girl, that studied the face features and voice of the person who committed the crime. He was sentenced to jail over forty years and with the help of DNA testing, he could prove his innocence. This shows that we shouldn't always trust our memory to be a reliable source of evidence, since it is very easy to manipulate our memories.

False Memory

What we see, smell or hear are senses that transmit information into our brain and stores it for a very long time. Therefore memory was long thought to be reliable and there would be no better evidence than eyewitnesses that saw the crime. By studying how memory works and what factors influence what we remember, we can prove that the memory is like a software, that is easy to manipulate.
A good example would be the case of Ronald Cotton who was accused of raping Jennifer Thompson and sentenced to jail innocent for plus forty five years. During the crime, Jennifer Thompson was focusing on memorizing details of his facial structure, his voice, height and other physical features, that helped her identifying the rapist on a photo line-up. However to make sure Ronald Cotton was the right guy she made a composite sketch before she identified him. This shows that our memory is easy deceived and that it is not the most reliable source for evidence. Eyewitnesses have a hard time if the person who committed the crime is not in the line up. Our human mind analysis and chooses therefore the person that looks similar. Elizabeth Loftus a famous psycholgist spent decades studying the human mind. In her famous "Car Crash" study shows how easy memories are influenced by different things. Eyewitnesses should be still used on a court trial, because it is still an important evidence, but shouldn't be totally relied on since what we already know, memories aren't the best evidence to give.