Mental+Model+Question

Question 1 What was said to be reliable evident, an eye witness testimony, has now been called unreliable because of new studies with the brain. It has been found that the brain puts different ideas together that don't necessarily make sense into a mental model of what the person thinks happened. Every person sees thing differently and therefore has different reasoning behind what they saw. The brain doesn't interpret an event into tiny parts, it sees it as an entire event and our imagination puts things into our brain of what we believe or want to believe happened. Our mental model is affected by our point of view, people involved, and personal beliefs. In courts, eye-witness testimony is a major way of proving someone innocent or guilty. However, new studies show that many times an eye-witness blames the wrong person or didn't see as much as they may have thought they saw. The only problem is, sometimes there is no better resource than using an eye-witness and everybody trusts a person under oath that saw the event.
 * Please organize by last name in alphabetical order. You can specify your question at the start of your response. Thank you. (M. Grdinic)**
 * Christopher, Zach**

Question 1 I can understand why eyewitness testimony has come under fire recently. As the idea of the mental model has been shown to be the primary way to explain personal views on situations, experts have realized that each eyewitness has his/her own mental model, and that isn't exactly what the objective reality is. Also, a mental model is a simplification of the real thing. The eyewitness can describe the big picture, but when asked for exact details, the mind can create something that isn't necessarily true. Each person's mental model is unique, so eyewitness testimony may not be the way to go anymore.
 * DiBartolo, Nick**

Eyewitness testimony has come under fire as being unreliable because of how the brain works. Mental models are simplifications of the actual occurrences, which shouldn’t be enough to be used in court. Every single detail isn’t remembered, just the overall idea of what happened. Also, biases play a role in eyewitness testimonies being unreliable. People look at things in different ways because of their opinions, which doesn’t help the court. Having a bad memory and remembering something being a different color, shape, or size creates inaccurate information told, without the person knowing he/she is giving false information. Although people probably aren’t giving completely inaccurate information, little details, which might be wrong, matter.
 * Godnik, Olivia**
 * Question 1**

Eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. First of all, our vision is sensitive to outside influences which could alter our perception on certain situations. In other words, often times we see only what we want to see. This doesn't mean that our senses are inaccurate; however, it does support the fact that people should not rely on the details of perception. Another reason why eyewitness testimony is unreliable is due to the nature of our memory. Our memories are an imperfect representation of reality--//remembering// what you saw changes the original memory. Also, in legal situations, memories will change as the result of excessive interrogation.Due to these issues, eyewitness testimonies are unreliable sources because there will never be correct/accurate representations.
 * Han, Harriet**
 * Question 1**

It is logical that eyewitness testimonies have been deemed unreliable as the idea of subjectivity was evaluated in this paper. Every person evaluates and reasons things differently whether it is because of previous experiences, different opinions or simply seeing something differently. These differences can be the difference between someone who leaves the courtroom innocent or someone who leaves to go to jail as proven guilty. Because we all interpret different scenarios and scenes differently, there is not one "right" answer to what happened and even little details that are different cannot be trusted. Although it may seem crazy, someone could see the car as grey while another person can see it as black. That detail of determining a color varies between people and could be the difference of finding a criminal. For these reasons, eyewitness testimonies while they may seem logical to the eyewitness, are unreliable to be used for other purposes as there is not a unanimous answer nor is there going to be a right answer because there will be little differences between each witness.
 * Hirshman, Rachel**
 * Question 1**

I believe eyewitness testimonies have become very unreliable. And it's not because people lie about their testimonies (which could also happen), but because everyones experience of the same event is different. For example, say there was a car accident. The person in the car and the person watching from the sidewalk would both have very different experiences. And who knows how accurate the memory is when the eyewitness testifies. There is no way to verify if that person is 100% accurate. When the memory, or model in our case, is always being recalled it becomes more and more unreliable because details can change while the mental model is constantly being remade.
 * Kim, Yery**
 * Question 1**

There can never be a true objective reality, there's no such thing as absolute objective truth, "truth is in the eye of the beholder". For instance, I might use a fork to eat pasta, while some people, like Ariel who lives in the bottom of the sea, use forks to brush their hair. Things can only have the value that we bestow on them, people who were taught things differently only know it as a certain way, making that the "objective truth" to them. Every mind sees different objective truths and there's no way to share how we model things unless we are able to project our minds and thoughts to each other. seeing as we don't have the technology to be able to do so, as of now, we just settle for whatever is closest to reality for the majority of people. If many more people think a certain way, people think that that's the truth and will start believing it. So, even though we can never have a clear objective truth, we are able to come at least close to it by following the majority's observations and using prior knowledge to try to infer what actually happens.
 * Becky Lee**
 * Question 3**

Question 1 Eyewitness testimony is becoming more and more unreliable. This is because of the way the brain works. When we try to remember something, we dont just pick out a memory. Our brain actually recreates that event, and therefore it can be different to everyone based off the enviroment and other factors. "No two mental models are the same, because no one has the exact same reponse to experiences." This means that two people can see the same thing, but their stories could be quite different. So thats why eye witness testimonies are risky, because what the witness saw, could be very different from what actually happens.
 * Nediyakalayil, Shane**

Eyewitness testimony has been seen as more and more unreliable because people put together an image in their head that is different than the previous time the memory was recalled. Each time the memory is less detailed so it is not as reliable. No judge would want a source that consistently changes from how it was previously told. Another reason that eyewitness testimony is unreliable is because every witness has a different memory of what happened and that can change the actual storyline. One person may say that one thing happened while the other says the opposite. Because the mental model is just a simplification of what actually happened, the memory recalled in the end may not be the full story, which helps to conclude that eyewitness testimony is somewhat unreliable.
 * Pozin, Jake**
 * Question 1**

The reason why eyewitness accounts are becoming less reliable is because the human brain is trying to remember all the images from that event. However, the brain leaves out some details, and what it tends to do is replace that with what they think should be there. Also, the brain tends to make judgements and subjective biases while recalling things, and so when remembering these things, the brain takes on a certain bias towards one side. Besides that, eyewitness accounts aren't as reliable as should be thought since the account always varies from person to person. So if that's the case, then how can one know for sure which account is the most accurate? For all these reasons, I think that eyewitness accounts aren't reliable.
 * Qiao, Victor**
 * Question 1**

It is evident that the term "eyewitness" has become a subjective matter due to different interpretations by different people. This article covered the idea that a brain doesn't always choose what and what not to remember and how that respective memory is remembered. If you ask 100 different "eyewitnesses" about something that happened you are more than likely going to end up with 100 different accounts of that story. This just supports the idea that even people that witnessed something first-hand may not know everything that happened and therefore cannot have a 100% accurate recollection of the story. This is just how the mind works in the sense that recalling something will differ from it happening right in front of you.
 * Ring, Philip**
 * Question 1**

There is really no way to claim to objective reality since everyone has a different mental model. A single human being has an idea of what objective reality is and this idea comes from the way a person's senses interpret the world. People see, feel, smell, hear, and touch things in the world every day. Since everyone is different, there is no way to know that there is one exact way the world works. The best we can do is communicate with the rest of our society and agree on all that we can, even though there cannot be a 100% reliability with it.
 * Ruben, Ali**
 * Question 3**

When the brain tries to remember an event it reconstructs it almost from scratch, using the actual event as the basis. Each time, the overall idea of what happened may be the same, but the fine details that give away an investigation can be easily changed. For example: If an eyewitness is asked "was the car collision a fully head-on collision? or did one hit the front corner?" He/she could easily reconstruct both situations, and then try and figure out which one actually happened. To try and figure out, the brain constructs many mental models of what could have happened, and then chooses the most likely one. This can very easily be influenced by stereotypes, personal priorities, and outside parties going "Did this happen? Could it have been this? What about this?". Eyewitnesses have come under fire for being unreliable for this reason; their reconstructions of the event under investigation are quite fragile, and more often than not incorrect. Also: []
 * Shapiro, Daniel**
 * Question 1**

Eyewitness testimony is being seen as more unreliable because scientists are learning more and more about how our brain works. Basically, scientist have figured out that our brain reconstructs reality, and that it makes it much simpler and less detailed. Therefore, that person's testimony will never be completely 100% accurate. The text states, " Our brain has to recreate the stories when we need them." Once again, this shows that the brain isn't a perfect testimony, like a video camera would be. The brain would not recount the events that happened in perfect order and with ever detail, like a video camera would. Although the brain would be pretty helpful if there was nothing better, but it shouldn't decide the total outcome of someone committing a crime.
 * Spitz, Jacob**
 * Question 1**

1. This paper conveys the idea that everyone can experience the same event differently because of the way the brain understands the event. “We can never know whether our mental models are true to objective reality.” The problem with eyewitness testimony is that it is an eyewitness, someone who say something and created a mental model of the action or event. If there was a unaltered video feed of something happening, I believe it is the most solid evidence. In many ways, eyewitness testimony is the most unreliable not because of the slight variations in people mental models, but because one, they can lie, and two, two people can watch the same thing happen and arrive at completely different conclusions of how and why it happened. 2. I think that it is impossible to know whether or not scientific model represent reality. I think that when an idea is followed by many people, AND has tons and tons of research to support it, we can decide that we “know” they represent reality. We think of atoms as tiny, perfect balls that make up everything in this universe. We believe in this because research by leading scientists and experiments show that it is most likely true, but also for that fact that it gives us something to believe in. 3. We can claim to know objective reality because when enough people agree on something that makes sense, we can say that we know it’s true for a fact. If one hundred people look at a picture and say, that’s a butterfly, but one person sees it as a rhinoceros, well then that person is just crazy. This technically isn’t true by the ideas presented in this article, but it supports the ideas that when a majority takes away the same idea from looking at something, it makes sense to say that was they see is truly reality. Overall, we can claim to know objective reality because when enough people create the same-ish mental model, we believe that is what reality really looks like.
 * Stoehr, Benjamin**

I think that humans aren't realistically capable of determining some sort of single epistemological model that explains objective reality. Most humans will come short of determining objective reality by interpreting something in their mind through a "false" model that they believe to be objective reality -- a form of subjective reality. Lots of things can feed into interpreting a flawed, non-objective in truth version of subjective reality -- past experiences, preexisting knowledge, cultural/religious beliefs, ability of senses, etc. all change the epistemological process representing how one's brain operates. There is no human with the intelligence to determine objective reality that hasn't already been affected by one of the things listed above, blurring their vision and preventing them from determining objective reality. If there was someone who came into magically came into existence in an isolated world that prevented any external interactions, and had the mental capacity of a super genius, maybe he could use his "untainted" brain to successfully determine something. However, this is virtually impossible and eliminates the possibility of being certain that a singular viewpoint explains objective reality.
 * Tashma, Josh**
 * Question 3**

After seeing something, the brain creates a mental image which is the brain's representation of what the person sees. However, the representation is often subtly different from what actually happened. That is why eyewitness accounts are unreliable. For example, in California, a physicist was given a $400 speeding ticket for "running" a stop sign because that's what the police officer saw. However, using a 4-page mathematical paper, the man proved that he stopped at the stop sign and that the police officer hadn't actually seen him run the stop sign which meant that the officer had seen the wrong thing, even though that's what he saw. This shows that the brain is not always reliable and that crimes should not be judged entirely on what a person sees, or thinks they see. And the physicist's proof of his innocence: []
 * Volpyansky, Andrew**
 * Question 1**