Cognitive - Eyewitness Testimony

Question 1

What 5 factors effect Eyewitness testimony?

Answer 1

• Anxiety
• Schemas
• Age of witness
• Misleading information
• Use of Cognitive Interview

Question 2

What is weapon focus?

Answer 2

Concentration of a crime witness’s attention on a weapon and the resultant reduction in ability to remember other details of the crime

Question 3

Name a study into weapon focus

Answer 3

Loftus

Question 4

State the procedure of Loftus’ study into weapon focus

Answer 4

Volunteers waited in a waiting room. In one condition they hear low-volume discussion before a man leaves the near room holding a pen. Second condition they hear a high-volume hostile argument before a man leaves with a blood-stained knife. The participants were showed 50 photos to identify the man

Question 5

State the results of Loftus’ study into weapon focus

Answer 5

Pen: 49% identified the correct man
Knife: 33% identified the correct man

Question 6

What were the conclusions made from Loftus’ study into weapon focus?

Answer 6

Concentrating on a weapon distracts attention away from appearance of the perpetrator (weapon focus effect)

Anxiety / stress induced by the sight of a weapon narrows the focus of attention

This improves the recall of central details of a scene but diminishes accurate recall of peripheral details

Question 7

Name and explain a piece of supporting evidence for Loftus’ study into weapon focus

Answer 7

Loftus & Messot
Participants presented with a series of slides showing an event in a fast-food restaurant. Half saw cutomer give cashier a cheque, other half saw him point a gun at him. Eye movements recorded.
Found more eye fixations of weapon than on cheque and fixations on weapon for longer duration. Memory in weapon condition poorer than memory in cheque condition.

Question 8

Name and explain a piece of supporting evidence for Loftus’ study into weapon focus, involving a violent film

Answer 8

Loftus & Burns
2 conditions: violent or non-violent film.
Found in violent condition less accurate information about the crime.

Question 9

Evaluate Loftus’ research into weapon focus

Answer 9

• Supporting evidence (Loftus & Burns, Loftus & Messot)
• Low ecological validity (lab experiment)
• Ethical issues (deceiving participants)
• Contradictory later evidence (e.g Yuille & Cutshall)

Question 10

Name 2 field studies into the effect of anxiety on the accuracy of EWT

Answer 10

• Yuille and Cutshall

- Christian and Hubinette

Question 11

Explain the procedure and results of Yuille and Cutshall

Answer 11

Interviewed 13 witnesses from a real-life shooting involving the owner of a shop and an armed thief. The shop owner was wounded but recovered an the thief was shot dead. Some witnesses were close proximity, others were far.
Found that witnesses closest to the event provided the most detail, and those most distressed at the time provided most accurate detail 5 months later (anxiety enhanced the accuracy of EWT)
Contradicts Loftus

Question 12

Explain the procedure and results of Christian and Hubinette

Answer 12

Questioned 110 witnesses (some victims of incidents, some just bystanders).
The victims were more accurate in recall than the bystanders.
This was a genuine incident as opposed to a staged one (more ecological validity) and opposes Loftus’ study

Question 13

What are schemas?

Answer 13

Packages of knowledge that we acquire through experience. They help us to build up a picture of our world and enable us to make predictions about our day to day lives. Established by Cohen.

Question 14

What are the 5 ways Cohen suggested that schemas effect your memory?

Answer 14

• Selection (ignoring information that doesn’t fit current schemas)
• Abstraction (remembering the overall gist without exact details)
• Interpretation (providing existing knowledge to help us understand existing knowledge)
• Normalisation (memories distorted to fit with our existing information
• Retrieval (help us to fill gaps in memory to make a best guess)

Question 15

Name a study into schemas

Answer 15

Brewer and Treyens

Question 16

State the procedure of Brewer and Treyens

Answer 16

Got participants to wait one at a time in a room for 35 seconds. The room looked like an office and contained 61 items. Most objects were ones you would expect to be in an office, others such as a skull, a brick and a pair of pliers, were not. Later they were asked to recall the items in the office.

Question 17

State the findings of Brewer and Treyens

Answer 17

Most likely to recall typical office objects
Most mistakes came from substitution (e.g ‘pens’ that would be in the schema for office but weren’t actually there).
Also the ‘schema plus tag’ effect (e.g the skull)

Question 18

What is the ‘schema plus tag’ theory?

Answer 18

Having a schema for a situation but ‘tagging’ information that wouldn’t be expected there

Question 19

Evaluate the concept of schemas

Answer 19

It is a rather vague concept and schema theory offers no explanation as to how the schemas are acquired in the first place

Question 20

Summarise schemas in relation to EWT

Answer 20

We are only able to take in so much information at the scene of a crime or incident. At a later date when we are asked to provide greater detail then we rely on past experience (schemas) to fill in the gaps. We use expectations to reconstruct our memory.

Question 21

How much do children remember in comparison to adults?

Answer 21

• Children are generally inferior to adults when it comes to providing a complete account of past events (amount of information they can recall or recognise increases with age)
• Due to inferior encoding, storage and retrieval ability and lack of prior knowledge)

Question 22

How accurate is a child’s memory in comparison to an adult’s?

Answer 22

Contradictory findings:

• Geiselman and Padilla found children aged 7-12 were less accurate than adults in a filmed robbery report.
• Other researches failed to find such differences

Question 23

Name a study into how age effects the quantity of information individuals are able to recall after 5 months

Answer 23

Flin et al

Question 24

State the procedure of Flin et al’s study

Answer 24

Staged an incident and questioned children and adults about it a day later and again five months later.

Question 25

What were the findings from Flin et al’s study?

Answer 25

Both groups (young and old) performed equally well the following day but after five months the children’s group had forgotten significantly more, suggesting the EWT of children becomes less reliable over time

Question 26

Evaluate Flin et al’s study

Answer 26

• Good ecological validity (children asked to recall after 5 months in court)
• Bad ecological validity (they were told to concentrate, not like in reality)

Question 27

Name and explain a study into how age effects source recognition

Answer 27

Poole and Lindsay

Question 28

State the procedure for Poole and Lindsay’s study

Answer 28

Got children of varying ages (three to eight) to watch a science demonstration following which they listened to a story which contained some of the science material but also some new information. They were later questioned on where they got the information from; the story or the demonstration.

Question 29

What were the findings from Poole and Lindsay’s study?

Answer 29

The younger age group were less able to distinguish the source of the information (either from the story or the demonstration) but the older children were more able to do this.
Poole an Lindsay concluded that young children are poor at ‘source recognition’ they are unlikely to make for good eye witnesses.

Question 30

Evaluate Poole and Lindsay’s study

Answer 30

• It was a field experiment, so no demand characteristics

- Difficult to eliminate extraneous variables

Question 31

What did Ceci and Bruck conclude as the 4 main factors affecting children’s EWT?

Answer 31

• Interviewer bias (e.g leading questions)
• Repeated questions (more likely to change answer when question is repeated)
• Stereotype induction (say negative things because of the context of being asked the questions)
• Encouragement to ‘think really hard’ (may form new memories that didn’t happen)

Question 32

How does children’s encoding affect their EWT?

Answer 32

Lack of appropriate schema makes it difficult to encode accurately.
Could be beneficial; adults could rely on schema to remould their memory incorrectly

Question 33

How does children’s storage affect their EWT?

Answer 33

Time between encoding and retrieval effects accuracy. Children’s EWT is likely to suffer more than adults’ as the storage interval increases

Question 34

How does children’s retrieval affect their EWT?

Answer 34

More susceptible to misleading information / leading questions, which effects the accuracy of their retrieval

Question 35

Name a study into misleading questions being a factor affecting the accuracy of EWT

Answer 35

Loftus & Zanni

Question 36

State the procedure of Loftus & Zanni’s study

Answer 36

Involved a short film, and participants were divided into 2 groups and asked a series of questions; one group asked ‘open’ questions and one group asked ‘misleading’ questions about a broken headlight. (There wasn’t a broken headlight)

Question 37

State the results of Loftus & Zanni’s study

Answer 37

17% who were asked the misleading question answered saying they saw a broken headlight
7% who were asked the open question saw it

Concluded the wording of the question had a significant effect on participants’ memory of the event (misleading questions distorted the memory)

Question 38

Evaluate Loftus & Zanni’s study

Answer 38

• Potentially just demand characteristics (participants trying to please the interviewer through their implications)
• Realistic material increasing ecological validity
• Artificial situation, low ecological validity (but was the same across both groups so can’t explain the difference in results)
• Deceived the participants (no fully informed consent)

Question 39

Name a study into how misinformation can effect EWT

Answer 39

Loftus (1975)

Question 40

State the procedure of Loftus’ study into misinformation

Answer 40

Participants shown a film showing the events leading up to a car crash and were then asked 10 questions about the film. The experimental group had the question ‘How fast was the car travelling when it drove past the barn’ (misinformation about the barn) and the control group ‘How fast was the car travelling on the country road’.
One week later the participants were asked ‘did you see a barn?’ (open question to both groups)

Question 41

What were the results from Loftus’ study into misinformation?

Answer 41

Only 3% of the control group said they had seen a barn
17% of the experimental group saw it

Misleading information had an effect on participants’ memory

Question 42

Name and explain a study into Old people and the weapon focus

Answer 42

Yarmey
Showed a film of a confrontation in a shop, one with a knife and one without a knife.
80% of them failed to recall a knife in the attacker’s hand.
Only 20% of younger adults failed to recall the knife.
This might mean that elderly people are less susceptible to the weapon focus, which might mean that their recall of other peripheral details is better

Question 43

Name and explain a study into Old people and misleading information

Answer 43

Cohen and Faulkner
Found that elderly people were far more susceptible to the effects of misleading information, included in an account they read of a kidnapping, than middle aged people