Loftus reflects on how the original study emerged partly by chance—from a lunch conversation with her lawyer cousin and a growing desire to work on questions with clearer real-world relevance. What followed became a landmark demonstration that the wording of a question can influence what people later report remembering.

In the conversation, we explore:

• how the original experiments were designed and conducted,
• what happens to the original memory after misinformation is introduced,
• whether the effect reflects overwriting, retrieval interference, or source-monitoring problems,
• and how this line of work reshaped theories of memory.

We also discuss the current large-scale replication project inspired by the original studies. What aspects of the classic experiment should remain unchanged? Which elements can be modernized? Does it matter if participants watch digital videos on computers rather than projected film clips? Could culturally different vehicles—such as scooters instead of cars—produce similar effects?

The episode also touches on a broader issue in replication research: how revisiting classic findings can become more than an attempt to reproduce an effect. Large collaborative projects may also provide opportunities to test alternative explanations and extend the original work in new directions.

More than fifty years after the original experiment, the central question remains remarkably current:

How much of what we remember is shaped by what happened afterward?

Music written and played by Rolf Zwaan

Further reading:

Website Elizabeth Loftus: https://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/loftus/

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In this episode, we take a closer look at what that shift means in practice.

What happens when research moves from a single study to a collaboration involving dozens of labs? How do you organize such a project—and what new challenges emerge along the way?

I speak with Katja Pronizius (University of Vienna, Austria), one of the authors of The Advantage of Big Team Science about the structure of big team science, its advantages, and the challenges that come with working at scale. These include issues of coordination, communication across cultures, and the distribution of responsibility within large teams.

In the second part of the episode, I talk to Bjørn Sætrevik (University of Bergen, Norway) about what it is like to work inside such a large-scale collaboration. The conversation turns to a question that quickly becomes central in projects like this: how to assign roles and give credit when many people contribute in different ways.

Together, these conversations highlight how scaling up research changes not only how studies are conducted, but also how contributions are organized, recognized, and made meaningful.

At this stage of the project, labs are still joining and working groups are being formed. The structure of the collaboration is taking shape—and many of the questions discussed in this episode are becoming directly relevant.

Mentioned in the episode:

Article Katja Pronizius: https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/12/1/160129/218054/The-Advantage-of-Big-Team-Science-Lessons-Learned

Preprint Bjørn Sætrevik: https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/9kwnq_v1

Music written and played by Rolf Zwaan

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In this first episode of Research as it Happens, we go back to where the project began.

What starts as a simple question—how robust is a well-known finding?—quickly opens up a much larger set of issues about how research is done, how evidence is evaluated, and how scientific knowledge develops over time.

The project itself grew out of a conversation between Rolf Zwaan and Anita Eerland about a classic study in psychology: Loftus and Palmer (1974) The study showed that the way a question is phrased can influence what people remember about an event—a finding that has become a staple in psychology textbooks.

In this episode:

• Rolf talks with Anita Eerland (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands) about how that initial conversation at the kitchen table developed into a large-scale, international research project that they are now leading.
• He also speaks with Massimo Grassi (University of Padua, Italy) about how he uses the Loftus study in his teaching, and what he expects from a project that revisits such a well-established finding.

Together, these conversations highlight how even familiar results can raise new questions when examined more closely—and how different researchers bring different perspectives to the same problem.

At the time of recording, the project is still in its early stages, with researchers joining from labs around the world and smaller teams forming to develop materials and plan the first studies.

This is where it starts.

Music written and played by Rolf Zwaan

Mentioned in the episode:

Target study:

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction between Language and Memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589.

Blog posts Rolf:

Memory, Misinformation, and the Need to Replicate https://rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/memory-misinformation-and-the-need

Memory, Misinformation, and Loftus and Palmer, Revisited https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3 https://rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/memory-misinformation-and-loftus

Multilab studies by Massimo Grassi:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25152459251379432

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-06654-0

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