Lotfus and Palmer showed some student participants a video reconstruction of a car accident. Different groups of the participants were given a different version of the eye witness question:

How fast were the cars going when they (blank) each other?

They missing word was different for each group- ranging from \"collided\" to \"smashed\"

Depending on the intensity of the words connotations- the eye witnesses made different estimations ( a range of 9mph) proving that the words used can have an effect on recall accuracy.

Evaluation-

The experiment lacks mundane realism for being a lab experiment but it has a strong control of variables.

Psychology- Memory