Eye witness testimony (GREY)

Question 1

What is eye witness testimony?

Answer 1

• Evidence provided to the police or in court by a person who has witnessed a crime.

Question 2

What are the factors affecting the accuracy of eye witness testimony?

Answer 2

• Misleading information

- Leading question

Question 3

What is misleading information?

Answer 3

• Information that may lead to a witness’s memory of a crime being altered.

Question 4

What is a leading question?

Answer 4

• A question which suggests to the witness what answer is desired, or leads them to the desired answer.

Question 5

Describe Loftus and Palmer’s 1st study on leading information.

Answer 5

• Participants watched film clips of a car accident, then answered questions.
• One asked about the speed of the cars; the verb was different in each of the 5 conditions: smashed/collided/bumped/hit/contacted.
• The verb acts to lead the witness, the use of certain verbs can change a person’s interpretation of an event.

Question 6

What were the findings of Loftus and Palmer’s study on leading information?

Answer 6

• the mean estimate for the word smashed was the highest

- contacted was the smallest.

Question 7

What are the 2 explanations for Loftus and Palmer’s results?

Answer 7

• Response bias explanation: just give an answer to fit in with the question
• Altered memory explanation: the question itself alters the meaning of the event

Question 8

What happened in Loftus and Palmer’s 2nd experiment?

Answer 8

• Participants watched clips of a car crash
• They answered questions as per experiment 1, but this time they only had two verbs, either hit or smashed
• Participants who were asked ‘smashed’ gave a higher mean speed estimated than those asked ‘hit’
• A week later they were asked if they saw any broken glass (there was no broken glass)
• More people answered yes in the ‘smashed’ condition
• These findings support the altered memory explanation because they were asked a week later

Question 9

What is reconstructive memory?

Answer 9

• We rebuild our memory every time we use it
• Automatic and unconscious
• We use stereotypes, expectations from our mental schemes and any misleading information we receive

Question 10

What is post-event discussion?

Answer 10

• Discussion with other witnesses or interviewers where memories can become contaminated by discussion with others.

Question 11

What happened in Gabbert et al’s study on post-event discussion?

Answer 11

• Pairs of participants; each participant watched a video of the same crime
• Each member of the pair saw a different perspective
• They discussed the crime together before completing a recall test
• 71% of participants reported details of the crime they hadn’t seen but they had gathered from their discussion with the paired participant
• 0% of the control group reported details they hadn’t seen
• In conclusion, participants go along with the information gathered at discussions to either win social approval or they think they’re wrong
• Called ‘memory conformity’

Question 12

Who is Ronald Cotton?

Answer 12

• He was falsely accused of sexual assault
• The victim constructed a false memory of Cotton and convinced herself that she was right
• Cotton was the only one in the line up and the photos and the police told her that they were the same person and so she was completely convinced that she had the right man
• When she imagined the situation, she imagined Cotton

Question 13

What happened in Sutherland and Hayne’s study on misleading information?

Answer 13

• Showed participants a video clip
• Then asked misleading questions
• Recall was better for the central details of the event than peripheral details
• Presumably participant’s attention was focused on the central features of the event and this made them more resistant to contamination
• Therefore the effect on quality of testimony may not be as strong as research suggests

Question 14

What are the 4 cognitive interviews retrieval techniques?

Answer 14

1 - Report everything
2 - Mental reinstatement of original context (mentally recreate incident)
3 - Recall events in different order
4 - Changing the perspective (imagine other points of view of incident)

Question 15

Why is reporting everything important?

Answer 15

• Witnesses may leave out details they feel are irrelevant especially if they do not fit into their existing schemas for that type of event
• Reporting everything prevents judgements on what to report being made on the basis of schema
• These memories may then in turn act to cue other memories about the crime and so forgetting is reduced

Question 16

Why is mental reinstatement of original context important?

Answer 16

• Context cues encoded at the time of the crime can be recalled and these in turn will trigger recall of memories which otherwise will be forgotten

Question 17

Why is recalling events in a different order important?

Answer 17

• This interrupts the use of schemas by for example working from the mid-point backwards or from the end backwards, and prevents expectations of what might have happened from dictating their testimony

Question 18

Why is changing the perspective important?

Answer 18

• Prevents the activation of schemas
• Otherwise eg, if you saw a robbery as you walked into Tesco, your schema of what happens every time you walk into Tesco may be what you report instead of what actually happened

Question 19

What are the strengths of the cognitive interview?

Answer 19

• Research support for the effectiveness of the interview
• Carried out a meta-analysis combining data from 50 studies
• Findings showed that the enhanced interview consistently produced more correct information than the standard police interview
• This is useful because the accurate information makes it more likely that the correct suspect is identified

Question 20

What are the limitations of the cognitive interview?

Answer 20

• Time consuming
• More time is needed to carry out the interview and train police
• This means there may not be enough time to carry out the interviews properly and so the benefits are not used in every case
• Another limitation is that is creates an increase in inaccurate information
• Found an 81% increase in accurate information but also a 61% increase in incorrect information when CI was compared to a standard interview
• This could lead to possible misidentification of a suspect