//Eyewitness testimony

Question 1

What is eyewitness testimony

Answer 1

• the evidence provided by people who witnessed a particular event or crime. Relies on recall from memory
• description of criminals and crime scenes
• witnesses are often inaccurate in their recollection of events and the people involved
• many cognitive psychologists focus on working out what factors affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, and how accuracy can be improved in interviews

Question 2

Stages of EWT

Answer 2

• encode
• storage
• retrieval

Question 3

Wells et al- lab experiment

Answer 3

• pps told to wait in a cubicle before the start of the experiment
• there was a calculator in the cubicle: a confederate of the experiment appeared and popped it in her bag
• only 58% correctly identified ‘the thief’ from a set of 6 photos
• when the pps were asked to testify in a mock trial, 80% were believed by the jury
• jurers fine EWT very believable

Question 4

Allport and Postman (1947)

Answer 4

• when asked to recall details of the picture opposite, pps tended to report that it was the black man who was holding the razor
• clearly this is not correct and shows that memory is an active process and can be changed to ‘fit in’ with what we expect to happen based on our knowledge and understanding of society

Question 5

Why are schemas important

Answer 5

• remove the need to store similar information more than once
• but we might distort them in some way- information may not be exactly the same as what we encounteretd

Question 6

EWT can be affected by misleading questions- Loftus and Palmer (1974)- aim

Answer 6

-investigate how EWT can be distorted using leading questions, where a certain answer is implied in the question

Question 7

EWT can be affected by misleading questions- Loftus and Palmer (1974)- method and results EXPERIMENT 1

Answer 7

EXPERIMENT 1

• pps were shown a film of a multiple car crash
• they were asked a series of questions including ‘How fast do you think the cars were going when they hit’
• in different conditions, the word ‘hit’ was replaced with ‘smashed’, ‘collieded’, ‘bumped’, ir ‘contacted’
• pps given the word ‘smashed’ estimated the highest speed (average of 41mph) and those given the word ‘contacted’ gave the lowest estimate ‘average of 32mph)

Question 8

EWT can be affected by misleading questions- Loftus and Palmer (1974)- method and results EXPERIMENT 2

Answer 8

EXPERIMENT 2

• pps were split into three groups- one group was given the verb ‘smashed’, another ‘hit’ and the third control group wasn’t given any indication of the vehicles’ speed
• a week later the pps were asked ‘did you see any broken glass’
• although no broken glass in the film, pps were more likely to say they’d seen broken glass in the ‘smashed’ condition than any other

Question 9

EWT can be affected by misleading questions- Loftus and Palmer (1974)- conclusion

Answer 9

-leading questions can affect the accuracy of people’s memories of any event

Question 10

EWT can be affected by misleading questions- Loftus and Palmer (1974)- evaluation

Answer 10

• has implications for questions in police interviews
• artifical experiment- watching a video is not a real life event which potentially affects recall
• a later study found that pps who thought they’d witnessed a real robbery could give an accurate description of the robber
• experimental design might lead to demand characteristics, where the results are skewed because of pps expectations of the purposes of the experiment e.g. the leding questions might have given pps clues about the nature of the experiment and so pps might have acted accordingly- reduced reliability of experiment

Question 11

Loftus and Zanni (1975)- aim

Answer 11

-investigated how altering the wording of a question can produce a leading question that can distort EWT

Question 12

Loftus and Zanni (1975)- method

Answer 12

• pps were shwon a film of a car crash
• they were asked either ‘did you see a broken headlight’ or ‘did you see the broken headlight’
• there was no broken headlight

Question 13

Loftus and Zanni (1975)- results

Answer 13

-17% of those asked about ‘the’ broken headlight claimed they saw one, compared to 7% in the group asked about ‘a’ broken headlight

Question 14

Loftus and Zanni (1975)- conclusion

Answer 14

-the use of the word ‘the’ is enough to affect the accuracy of people’s memories of an event

Question 15

Loftus and Zanni (1975)- evaluation

Answer 15

• has implications for EWT
• lab study so can control extraneous variables
• possible to establish cause and effect
• but artificial- pps were shown a film of a car crash, not an actual car crash, so lacks ecological validity

Question 16

Post event discussion can affect the accuracy of recall- Shaw et al (1997)

Answer 16

• paired pps with a confederate
• the pairs were shown videos of a staged robbery and were interviewed together afterwards
• the pp and the confederate alternated who answered the questions first
• when pp responded first, recall was accurate 58% of the time
• when the confederate answered first and gave accurate answers, the recall of the pps was 67%
• if the confederate gave inaccurate answers, correct recall for the pps fell to 42%

Question 17

Post event discussion can affect the accuracy of recall- Gabbert et al (2004)

Answer 17

• study involved two groups of pps, young adults and older adults
• both groups watched a staged crime and were then exposed to misleading information- through conversation with a confederate who was pretending to be another pp, or reading a written report of the crime, supposedly written by another pp
• the pps were then given a recall test about the event they’d witnessed
• both groups of adults were more likely to report inaccurate information after a conversation with a confederate than after reading the report

Question 18

The age of the the witness can affect the accuracy of EWT- Valentine and Coxon (1997)- method

Answer 18

• 3 groups of pps (children, adults, elderly) watcjed a video of akidnapping
• they were then asked a series of leading and non leading questions about what they had seen

Question 19

The age of the the witness can affect the accuracy of EWT- Valentine and Coxon (1997)- results and conclusion

Answer 19

• both of the elderly people and the children gave more incorrect asnwers to non leading questions
• children were misled more by leading questions than adults or the elderly
• age has an effectt on the accuracy of EWT

Question 20

The age of the the witness can affect the accuracy of EWT- Valentine and Coxon (1997)- evaluation

Answer 20

• this has implicatkions in law when children or elderly people are questioned
• howeer the experiment was artifical and so wasn’t as emotionally arousing as the same situation would have been in reallife
• lacks ecological validity
• results may only show how well people remember things from TV, rather than showing tha accuracy of memories of real life situations

Question 21

How does anxiety affect focus

Answer 21

• psychologists tend to believe that small increases in anxiety and arousal may increase the accuracy of memory, but high levels have a negative effect on accuracy
• in violent crimes, where anxiety and arousal are high, the witness may focus on central details e.g. a weapon, and neglect other peripheral details e.g. what the criminal was wearing

Question 22

Loftus (1979)- weapon focus in EWT- method

Answer 22

• in a study with an indepedent groups design, pps heard a discussion in a nearby room
• in one condition, a man came out of the room with a pen and grease on his hands
• in the second condition, the man came out carrying a knife covered in blood
• pps were asked to identify the man from 50 photos

Question 23

Loftus (1979)- weapon focus in EWT- results and conclusion

Answer 23

-pps in condition 1 were 49% accuate
pps in condition 2 were 33% accurate
-when anxious and aroused, witnesses focus on a weapon at the expense of other details

Question 24

Loftus (1979)- weapon focus in EWT- evaluation

Answer 24

• this study has high ecological validity as the pps weren’t aware that the study was staged
• however this means that there are ethical considerations as pps could have been distressed at the sight of the man with the knife

Question 25

Yuille and Cutshall (1986)- study to show that misleading questions and anxiety don’t always affect EWT

Answer 25

• this study showed that witnesses of a real incident had remarkly accurate memories of the event
• a thief was shot and killed by police and witnesses were interviewd. 13 of them were invited to be re-interviewd 5 months later. Recall was found to be highly accurate, even after this time period
• the researchers had included two misleading questions in the study but these had no effect on the subject’s answers
• this study had high ecological validity as it was based on a real life event. However witnesses experienced high stress levels- difficult to determine whether proximity of stress contributed to the accuracy or their recall