Professor Jun Kawaguchi of Nagoya University and others succeeded in reproducing the language hiding effect using computer simulation.This is a phenomenon that affects the witness testimony of crimes and causes false accusations.Although there are various theories to explain, it has been difficult to verify because it is difficult to reproduce in experiments.
In a criminal investigation, it is very important for a witness to look at the suspect's face to determine if he is the true criminal.However, if the criminal's face is associated with words such as "drooping eyes" and "small nose" and remembered, the suspect may mistakenly think that he is the true criminal just because he has drooping eyes and a small nose.In this way, the memory is erroneously recalled due to the influence of language memory, which is a phenomenon called the language concealment effect.The simulation that reproduces this can be roughly divided into two steps.The stage of remembering the criminal's face and the stage of looking at the suspect's face and comparing it with the memory.
At the memory stage, the image of the face of person A, who is the true criminal, is memorized.In addition, the characteristics are replaced with words such as "drooping eyes", "long nose", and "thick lips" for learning.This makes it possible to remember the face that is memorized by the words that indicate the facial features when the face of person A is shown again to the computer.At the next stage of looking at the suspect's face, he shows the face of person B, who has similar characteristics to the true criminal, such as "thick drooping eyes," "large long nose," and "thick lower lip."Then, in the computer, the linguistic memories such as "drooping eyes", "long nose", and "thick lips" that were remembered in the past were activated, and I remembered the face of person A.In other words, when I saw the face of person B, I mistakenly thought that he was the same person as the criminal I had seen in the past.
In this way, the computer was able to reproduce the language hiding effect.Furthermore, it was shown that it is caused by "wrongly remembering facial memory by language".As research progresses, it will lead to improved investigation methods and prevent false accusations due to the language hiding effect.
