Chapter 5 Eyewitness Testimony Flashcards
Stages of memory
-Perception/attention
(I see an unfamiliar male, i notice he has a round face and bushy eyebrows)
-encoding
(Male, round face, bushy eyebrows)
-short-term memory
(Male, full eyebrows)
-long-term memory
(Male, full eyebrows)
-retrieval stage
(What did he look like? He had full eyebrows)
The encoding stage
Perceive and pay attention to details in your environment
Short-term memory
Limited capacity , passes into your long-term memory to make room ffor new info
Long-term memory
Accessed and retrieve as needed, not every piece of info will go through all the memory stages
Recall memory
Reporting details of a previously witnessed event or person
Ex: describing what the perpetrator did and what they looked like
Recognition memory
Determining whether a previously seen item or person is the same as what is currently being viewed
Ex: hearing a set of voices and identifying the perpetrators voice or identifying clothing worn by them during the crime
Misinformation effect
Phenomenon in which a eyewitness who is presented with inaccurate information after an event will incorporate that misinformation into a subsequent recall task
How does Hypnosis help with recall?
-with hypnosis people may be able to recall a greater amount of info after being traumatized
-a person under hypnosis is able to retreive memories otherwise inaccessible
Recognition memory
Involved determining whether a previously seen item or person is the one that is currently being viewed
Examples of recognition memory
- live lineups or photo arrays
- video surveillance records
- voice identification
Why conduct a lineup?
-A lineup identification reduces the uncertainty of whether a suspect is the perpetrator beyond the verbal description
-a witness identifying the suspect icreases the likelihood that the suspect is the perpetrator
-provides police with info about the physical similarity between lineup member chosen and perpetrator
Lineup distractors
Lineup members known to be innocent
Estimator variable: age
Age can have an effect on correct identifications/rejections in lineups
- older adults and children -> less likely to correctly identify perpetrator from lineup
Older adult maltreatment
Increasingly exposed to dif forms of ,maltreatment
-physical, psychological, sexual
-financial abuse, exploitation
-neglect and abandonment
-for every 1 case of reported older adult maltreatment, 23.5 cases go unreported
Suggestibility
- older adults are more likely to appear overconfident in their memory accuracy for specific events
Experiments of suggestibility results
-older adults perform worse than younger adults
-provide more incorrect responses to leading, misleading questions and negative interviewer feedback
-interviewer compliance increases with older adult age
Other correlates of memory suggestibility
- lower self-esteem relates to increased interviewer compliance
- higher situational anxiety, such as following negative interviewer feedback, increases suggestibility
- greater memory distrust is related to increased suggestibility
Perceptions of older adult eyewitness credibility: Wright & Holliday
Police officers surveyed indicated that older adult eyewitnesses had lower gredibility than younger witnesses in the areas of:
- reliability of info recalled
- thouroughness
- attention to detail
Perceptions of older adult eyewitness credibility: Wyman et al
52.9% of Canadiam law enforcement professionals indicated that older adults experience more challended recalling info when compared to younger populations
Adult mock jurors evaluate older adult witnesses more negativelt than younger witnesses when
- the crime against the older adult was more severe
- mock-jurors scored higher on measures of ageism
- the older adult witness had a cognitive impairement
Older adult interviewing adaptations
- Interview older adult at their personal residence
- Wearing plainclothes during police interviews, rather than scary uniform
- Technological aids (bluetooth receivers for hearing aid devices, voice amplifiers)
- Speaking at a slower pace
- Scheduling extended time for older adult to complete interview
- Redirections
- Follow-up or additional interview opportunities
- Timing of the interview
