Abstract
Some libel suits involving TV news stories appear to have originated because viewers confused what they heard with what they saw. This experiment examines the “translation phenomenon,” a phenomenon in which words are remembered as pictures, and vice versa. Translation is more likely to occur after the passage of 48 hours. And it most often results in facts that were conveyed in narration being remembered as having been conveyed in video. These findings are interpreted in light of current encoding and memory theory.
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