EWT - Age Flashcards
What was the leading question asked to children in the twister study?
Any touched your bum didn’t she?
What age group make the best eye witnesses?
Middle Aged
What did Ceci find about child witnesses?
They are easily led by leading questions.
They are over imaginative
They change their answers to please the interviewer
They are always likely to choose someone in a lineup - even if wrongly
What is meant by ‘own age bias’?
When witnesses are more likely to recall people their own age better than different ages.
Studies that are own age bias are a problem - why?
Studies that test the memory of old people by asking them to recall a young persons picture will almost always show their memory to be poor. However not because of age, but because the memory test itself was too hard and unfamiliar!
What did research by Caranza find?
When recalling a person, age had no effect on immediate accuracy. However older witnesses memory decayed over time quicker than younger witnesses.
What did research by Memon conclude?
There are no significant age differences in the accuracy of young or old witnesses.
What are schemas?
Expectations of future events based on our experiences.
Why can schemas cause problems for older witnesses?
The older you are the more schemas (expectations) you will have about events. This means there is a chance that memory recall is skewed by schemas.
The Twister study uses the field experiment research method. Why is this high in ecological validity?
High levels of realism.
Represents real life well.
What is the difference between a field experiment and a lab experiment?
Lab experiments take place in a tightly controlled environment whereas field experiments take place in the participants own environment.
