Loftus and Palmer:In Loftus and Palmer's study, the aim was to determine if leading questions would affect the participant's estimation of speed. In this study, participant's watched films of car accidents and were then provided with a questionnaire regarding details on what they had seen. In five different conditions, though, the participants were asked the same leading question of, "how fast was the car going when it hit the other car?" but with rephrased verbs such as "smashed" "collided" "bumped" "hit" and "contacted". However, the researchers did not tell the participants what they were testing exactly.Why it is reconstructive memory: "The results indicate that the critical word in the question consistently affected the participants' answers to the question. The researchers argued that it may be that the different speed estimates are the result of response-bias, i.e. the participants are uncertain about the exact speed, and therefore a verb like "smashed" biases their response towards a higher estimate. It may also be that the way the question is formed results in a change in the participant's mental representation of the accident, i.e. the verb "smashed" activates a cognitive schema of a severe accident that may change the participant's memory of the accident. This distortion of memory is based on reconstruction so that it is not the actual details of the accident that are remembered but rather what is in line with a cognitive schema of a severe accident. This interpretation is in line with Bartlett's suggestion of reconstructive memory due to schema processing."In conclusion, it seems that participants' memory of an accident could be changed by using suggestive questions.

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