Eyewitness Testimony Flashcards
What is eyewitness testimony?
Evidence given by a witness to a significant event.
What stages can error occur in memory for eyewitness testimony ?
Acquisition/ encoding
Storage
Retrieval
What is a schema?
A package of knowledge about something built up through our experience of the world.
What does a schema do?
Helps us make sense of familiar situations and avoid interruption of new info.
Can influence how we encode, store and retrieve info - leading us to reconstruct our memories making recall inaccurate.
What is reconstructive memory?
Memory distorted by the individuals prior knowledge and experiences.
Why do schema lead to reconstructive memory?
They ignore aspects that do not fit a current schema.
Store main features only.
Allow us to make sense of what we’ve seen by filling in the gaps.
Distort memories to fit with prior experiences.
Use schema to provide the basis of a correct guess.
What does Bartlett suggest about reconstructive memory?
It is not a passive process it is an active one.
