Memory - Eye Witness Testimony - Misleading Information Flashcards
What is an eyewitness?
Someone who has witnessed a crime, they are usually present when the incident takes place.
What does the eyewitness do?
Use their memory of the crime to give a reconstruction of what happened or give their testimony.
What is an eyewitness testimony?
It’s the evidence provided in court by the person who witnessed the crime – this is with a view to identity the perpetrator.
What is the process of an eyewitness testimony?
The witness encodes into long term memory details of the event.
Encoding may by distorted or only partial as the witness will retain the information for a certain amount of time.
Therefore, memory could be lost during this time – or modified.
The witness will need to retrieve the memory from storage which may affect recall if the witness hasn’t been rehearsing the event in order to prevent decay.
What is misleading information?
It’s incorrect information that is given to an eyewitness after an event.
This can lead to a less accurate eyewitness testimony.
What are 2 ways that misleading information can conveyed to a witness that might impact their testimony?
During post-event discussions or leading questions.
Describe the Aim, Hypothesis, Method, Findings, Conclusion and Interpretation of the Loftus & Palmer (1974) study (first study)
Aim: Loftus and Palmer (1974) set up an experiment to investigate the effect of leading questions on the accuracy of an eyewitness testimony.
Method: They had a sample of 45 American students that were divided into five groups of nine.
All of the participants watched a video of a car crash and then were asked a specific question about the car’s speed.
Loftus and Palmer manipulated the verb within the question. For example: “how fast were the cars going when they smashed / collided / bumped / contacted / hit with each other?”
Findings: They found that they estimated speed was affected by the verb they used in the question.
For example, participants who received the verb “smashed” said an average speed of 40.5 mph. Whereas, participants who were given the verb “contacted” said an average speed of 31.8 mph, which is an overall difference of 8.7 mph.
Conclusion: Results show that the accuracy of eyewitness testimony is affected by leading questions and that a single word in a question can affect the accuracy of our judgements significantly.
What are the two explanations of the Loftus and Palmer study?
Substitution explanation – the intensity of a verb changes the memory.
Response bias – the researchers question changes of the participants respond to the question but not their actual memory.
Describe the Aim, Hypothesis, Method, Findings and Conclusions of the 2nd study.
Broken glass experiment:
2 % of the participants who were questioned previously using the verb “smashed” reported seeing broken glass.
14 % of the participants who were previously questioned using the verb “hit” reported seeing broken glass.
12% of the control group reported seeing broken glass.
What is post-event discussion?
Misleading information can come from sources such as other witnesses (co-witnesses), when they discuss the crime’s details after the incident.
Outline the Aim, Methods, Results, Findings, Conclusion & Interpretation of the study by Gabbert et al. (2003)
Aim: to investigate the effect of post-event discussion on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
Method: She had a sample of 60 students from the University of Aberdeen and 60 older adults, who were recruited from a local community.
The participants had to watch a video of a girl stealing money from a wallet. The participants were either tested individually (the control group) or in pairs (the co-witness group).
The participants in the co-witness group were told they watched the same video, but they had seen different perspectives of the same crime, only one person had actually witnessed the girl stealing.
The participants in the co-witness group discussed the crime together. All the participants completed a questionnaire to test their memory of the event.
Findings: Gabbert et al found that 71% of the witnesses in the co-witness group recalled information that they hadn’t see.
60% said the girl was guilty even though they didn’t see her commit a crime.
Conclusion: Results highlight the issue of post-event discussion and the powerful effect it can have of the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
Memory contamination?
When co-witnesses discuss a crime, they mix (mis)information from other witness with their own memories.
Memory conformity?
Witnesses go along with each other to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right.
What did Yuille and Cutshall investigate?
Yuille and Cutshall (1986) suggest that real life cases are more accurate than Loftus and Palmer.
The study showed that witnesses in a real-life incident (a gun shooting outside a Canadian gun shop) showed accurate memories of a real-life crime involving weapons.
A thief stole money and guns but was shot six times and then died. Police interviewed witnesses and 13 were reinterviewed five months after.
Recall was accurate, even in the time gap, and two misleading questions that the research team added had no effect on recall accuracy.
Individual differences?
Anastasi and Rhodes (2006) found that 18-25 and 35–45-year-olds were more accurate than 55-78 years in a facial recognition task.
However, age bias occurred as all the age gaps were accurate when they identified people of their age group.
