A three-year-old and a five-year-old watch as a toy is hidden in a box while another child is out of the room. When asked where the absent child will look for the toy on returning, the three-year-old points to where it really is, while the five-year-old points to where the absent child last saw it.

Loftus and Palmer investigated whether the wording of a question could change what people remember about an event. In one experiment, 45 participants watched film clips of car accidents and then answered questions about what they had seen. The critical question asked how fast the cars were going when they 'hit' each other; for different groups the verb was replaced with 'smashed', 'collided', 'bumped', or 'contacted'. Mean speed estimates were highest for the group given 'smashed' and lowest for 'contacted', although all groups had watched the same clips. In a second experiment, participants who had heard 'smashed' were more likely a week later to report having seen broken glass, although there was none in the film. The researchers concluded that information supplied after an event, through the wording of a question, can be integrated into memory, supporting a reconstructive view of memory.

References: Loftus, E. F. and Palmer, J. C., 1974. 'Reconstruction of automobile destruction.' Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), pp. 585 to 589. source adapted.

In a learning task, animals received a small reward for pressing a lever. Recordings showed bursts of dopamine activity when an unexpected reward arrived, and over time this activity shifted to the cue that predicted the reward.

Researchers followed pregnant women who reported their stress levels and gave samples to measure cortisol. Infants of mothers who had higher prenatal stress and cortisol later showed, on average, stronger reactions to mild novelty and took longer to settle.