Eyewitnesses Flashcards
(47 cards)
Why are eyewitnesses so error prone?
poor view of events
not realising event significance at the time
stress/arousal
memory for events decays over time
post event information effects
expectation and schemas
weak relationship between witness accuracy and confidence
Give an example of stress/arousal effects
weapon focus; people remember details of a weapon better than the criminal as it distracts them - Loftus, Loftus and Messo
What is post event information effects?
hearing other peoples accounts or misinformation or going over the event in their head can cause the account to change
What are Navon letters?
big letters made up of smaller letters
What did Darling, Martin, Hellmann and Memon find relating to Navon letters?
people that have a global bias are associated with better suspect identification rates
What effects can delay after an event cause?
increases the chance of false identification, memory is likely ro decay
What effects can exposure time cause?
the longer a crime/criminal is viewed the better the memory
people overestimate the duration of stressful events
with increased time there is increased confidence with an identification
What experiment conducted by Allport and Postman looked at expectation effects?
when shown a picture of a black man and a white man with a knife people incorrectly recalled the black man as having the knife
What did Branford and Johnson find in relation to schemas?
if people know the topic of information then comprehension and recall are better
What did Odinot, Wolters and Koppen find with interviewing techniques?
that asking people to freely recall information produced better recall than specific questioning
What influences can witnesses have on each other?
memory conformity
normative influence
people may believe another witness to be more reliable
What is memory conformity?
where one witness starts to believe they have seen what the other has seen when they have not
What is more influential, a co-witness or leading questions?
co-witness misinformation
What factor can affect memory conformity?
people are more likely to conform if the co-witness is of high status or a friend
What did Ellis, Shephard and Davies find in their first composite experiment?
that reconstructing photofits with the face in front of them was very difficult
What did Ellis, Shephard and Davies find in their second composite experiment?
accuracy for identifying the photofit for a given face had an average accuracy of 12.5%
What did Ellis, Shephard and Davies find in their third composite experiment?
there was no difference in the accuracy of a photofit creating by someone who attended to the face and someone who did not
What experiment did Frowd conduct to test E-Fit and Pro-Fit accuracy?
witnesses make a composite of a famous face that is unknown to them, participants are asked to identify the faces; only 20% success rate
Why is composite production performance so poor?
eyewitness limitations equipment limitations feature interference verbal overshadowing inappropriate theoretical basis
How are familiar and unfamiliar faces qualitatively different?
familiar faces are recognised better from internal features, unfamiliar faces are recognised better from external features
What are the benefits of sequential lineups?
they force witnesses to adopt an absolute judgement strategy as to whether the person being examine is the criminal or not; reduces false positives
What did Meissner and Brigham find in relation to the own race bias?
people are over twice as likely to identify own race than other race
more false positives with other race faces than own race
What is the cause of the own race bias?
less experience with faces of different races
less motivation to distinguish between faces from different races
prejudice of other races
physiognomic variability
What did Sporer find in relation to the own race bias?
non-whites are more likely to be identified in lineups
impaired recognition of other races
bias strongest for whites recognising other races
