Eye witness testimony - misleading information

Question 1

Eye witness testimony

Answer 1

• the evidence provided in court by a person who witnessed/saw a crime
• they may be able to identify the perpetrator of a crime
• the accuracy of EWT may be affected during initial encoding, storage or retrieval

Question 2

Misleading information

Answer 2

• a question that suggests to the witness what answer is desired or leads to the desired answer
• this is usually not intentional
• it can be during post event discussion or take form of leading questions
• e.g., did the robber hit the man in the head with a crowbar?

Question 3

Stages of eyewitness testimony - stage 1

Answer 3

The witness encodes information into their LTM.
They may only partial encode information as the event can happen quickly or may happen at night so they don’t see everything

Question 4

Stages of eyewitness testimony - stage 2

Answer 4

Witness holds onto the information for some time.
The memories may then become lost and/or distorted.
Other activities themselves may also interfere with the memory itself.

Question 5

Stages of eyewitness testimony - stage 3

Answer 5

Witness retrieves memory from storage.
There may be a presence or absence of information that may affect the accuracy of the memory.

Question 6

Case study - Loftus and Palmer - experiment 1

Answer 6

• Tested the distorted effect of questions on EWT
• 45 ppts (their students)
• they watched 7 traffic accident videos
• after each video they were given a questionnaire
• they were given different verbs in the question
  ~ smashed, collided, hit, contacted, bumped
• mean speed estimated in mph
  ~ smashed 40.8
  ~ contacted 31.8
• the different speed estimated occurred because of the critical word
• memory is affected by the wording of the question

Question 7

Case study - Lotus and Palmer - experiment 2

Answer 7

• different set of ppts
• they were divided into 3 groups and shown a video of a car accident
• group 1 = used the word smashed
• group 2 = used the word collided
• group 3 = weren’t given a question in relation to the speed of the car (control group)
• one week later they were asked 10 questions about the video
• one was ‘did you see any broken glass’ (there wasn’t actually any glass broken)
• those in the smashed group were more likely to say they saw glass
• shows that misleading post event information does change the accuracy of eye witness testimony