A3a1 Schemas and eyewitness memory

Question 1

Eyewitness

Answer 1

somebody who sees a crime or aspects of a crime scene and who helps the police to find out what has happened or to catch whoever was responsible

Question 2

Testimony

Answer 2

the statement an eyewitness gives to the police

Question 3

How could schemas affect testimonies?

Answer 3

If eyewitnesses use schemas to organise information about a crime, their recall of events may be affected.

Question 4

Tuckey and Brewer (2003)

Answer 4

mthey tested the idea of schemas affecting testimonies by finding out what people thought were typical of bank robberies. The participants were shown videos that contained 3 types of facts: 1) fit the bank robbery schema 2) didn’t fit it 3) were irrelevant to the schema. Participants remembered facts that fitted the schema or the opposite very well. They only forgot the irrelevant things. This suggests eyewitness memory might benefit from schemas

Question 5

Allport and Postman (1945)

Answer 5

a picture of a black man wearing a suit and a white man in overalls holding a razor were shown to participants. In more than half the reproductions the black man was falsely accused for holding the knife and ‘threatening’ the white man. This shows how people may have schemas towards black people that if applied to eyewitnesses, may make them unreliable.

Question 6

Boon and Davis (1987)

Answer 6

Participants were shown slides of a knife attack by a white man. Many participants wrongly chose the image of the black man holding the knife later on. But did not make this mistake when asked to describe the situation. This shows some memory tasks were more likely to be affected by schema.