Eye Witness Testimony

Question 1

What is an eye witness testimony?

Answer 1

When someone gives evidence concerning the identity of a criminal.

Question 2

Whats a cue?

Answer 2

Something which makes the brain recall something from the LTM.

Question 3

What’s a cognitive interview?

Answer 3

-Eyewitnesses asked to recall everything they remember about the crime, in case something is important.
-Increases recall by recreating the situation.

Question 4

Strengths

Answer 4

+Real world application
+High internal validity
+Misleading information affects it

Question 5

Weakness

Answer 5

-Low ecological validity (lab experiment)

Question 6

What is stage 1 (encoding)

Answer 6

-the witness encodes into the LTM (looks into the LTM) of an event.
-encoding may be distorted/partial due to crimes being violent/quick

Question 7

What is stage 2 (retention)

Answer 7

-retains information for a period of time
-memories can be lost or modified during this
-most forgetting happens in first few mins
-activities between encoding and retention may alter memories

Question 8

Stage 3 (retrieval)

Answer 8

-witness retrieving memory from storage
-what happens during the memories reconstruction may significantly affect its accuracy

Question 9

What did loftus do?

Answer 9

-Showed ppts a vid of a white car driving past a sign
-asked control group how fast they think the white car driving past the sign was.
-asked the experimental group how fast the white car driving past the barn down a country road was going

Question 10

IV and DV of loftus

Answer 10

IV: the question
DV: % of people with changed memory