Eyewitnesses

Question 1

Why are eyewitnesses so error prone?

Answer 1

poor view of events
not realising event significance at the time
stress/arousal
memory for events decays over time
post event information effects
expectation and schemas
weak relationship between witness accuracy and confidence

Question 2

Give an example of stress/arousal effects

Answer 2

weapon focus; people remember details of a weapon better than the criminal as it distracts them - Loftus, Loftus and Messo

Question 3

What is post event information effects?

Answer 3

hearing other peoples accounts or misinformation or going over the event in their head can cause the account to change

Question 4

What are Navon letters?

Answer 4

big letters made up of smaller letters

Question 5

What did Darling, Martin, Hellmann and Memon find relating to Navon letters?

Answer 5

people that have a global bias are associated with better suspect identification rates

Question 6

What effects can delay after an event cause?

Answer 6

increases the chance of false identification, memory is likely ro decay

Question 7

What effects can exposure time cause?

Answer 7

the longer a crime/criminal is viewed the better the memory
people overestimate the duration of stressful events
with increased time there is increased confidence with an identification

Question 8

What experiment conducted by Allport and Postman looked at expectation effects?

Answer 8

when shown a picture of a black man and a white man with a knife people incorrectly recalled the black man as having the knife

Question 9

What did Branford and Johnson find in relation to schemas?

Answer 9

if people know the topic of information then comprehension and recall are better

Question 10

What did Odinot, Wolters and Koppen find with interviewing techniques?

Answer 10

that asking people to freely recall information produced better recall than specific questioning

Question 11

What influences can witnesses have on each other?

Answer 11

memory conformity
normative influence
people may believe another witness to be more reliable

Question 12

What is memory conformity?

Answer 12

where one witness starts to believe they have seen what the other has seen when they have not

Question 13

What is more influential, a co-witness or leading questions?

Answer 13

co-witness misinformation

Question 14

What factor can affect memory conformity?

Answer 14

people are more likely to conform if the co-witness is of high status or a friend

Question 15

What did Ellis, Shephard and Davies find in their first composite experiment?

Answer 15

that reconstructing photofits with the face in front of them was very difficult

Question 16

What did Ellis, Shephard and Davies find in their second composite experiment?

Answer 16

accuracy for identifying the photofit for a given face had an average accuracy of 12.5%

Question 17

What did Ellis, Shephard and Davies find in their third composite experiment?

Answer 17

there was no difference in the accuracy of a photofit creating by someone who attended to the face and someone who did not

Question 18

What experiment did Frowd conduct to test E-Fit and Pro-Fit accuracy?

Answer 18

witnesses make a composite of a famous face that is unknown to them, participants are asked to identify the faces; only 20% success rate

Question 19

Why is composite production performance so poor?

Answer 19

eyewitness limitations
equipment limitations
feature interference
verbal overshadowing
inappropriate theoretical basis

Question 20

How are familiar and unfamiliar faces qualitatively different?

Answer 20

familiar faces are recognised better from internal features, unfamiliar faces are recognised better from external features

Question 21

What are the benefits of sequential lineups?

Answer 21

they force witnesses to adopt an absolute judgement strategy as to whether the person being examine is the criminal or not; reduces false positives

Question 22

What did Meissner and Brigham find in relation to the own race bias?

Answer 22

people are over twice as likely to identify own race than other race
more false positives with other race faces than own race

Question 23

What is the cause of the own race bias?

Answer 23

less experience with faces of different races
less motivation to distinguish between faces from different races
prejudice of other races
physiognomic variability

Question 24

What did Sporer find in relation to the own race bias?

Answer 24

non-whites are more likely to be identified in lineups
impaired recognition of other races
bias strongest for whites recognising other races

Question 25

What two types of facial processing did Sporer identify?

Answer 25

in group; automatic oncfigural processing, expertise and better recognition
out-group; face categorisation occurs, shallower encoding cognitive disregard

Question 26

What 5 factors affect identification?

Answer 26

attentional processes at encoding
perceptual expertise
distinctiveness of target
difficulty of task
social factors

Question 27

What is Valentines Multidimensional Face Space Model?

Answer 27

there is a map of features and everyone fits onto a certain place on the map; uses eye separation, nose size

Question 28

What did Hills and Pake find in relation to the own race bias?

Answer 28

black and white observers fixation on faces differently; being told which facial features to focus on eliminated the own race bias

Question 29

What are the disadvantages of child witnesses?

Answer 29

poorer knowledge base
less developed metamemory skills
poorer reality monitoring
greater susceptibility to misinformation

Question 30

What is a childs’ accuracy for criminal identification?

Answer 30

number of correct identifications increases with age and false recognitions decreases with age - Chance and Goldstein

Question 31

What is a childs’ accuracy of verbal recall?

Answer 31

free recall is comparable to adults, but they produce much less information and can be highly influenced by the interviewer

Question 32

How well can children distinguish fact from fantasy?

Answer 32

younger children made more source confusion that adults which got worse with delay, they were more susceptible to believe an implausible false memory

Question 33

What is false memory syndrome?

Answer 33

believing that a false memory actually happened and incorporating it into real life

Question 34

What 5 things can improve children’s recall?

Answer 34

providing social support
building rapport with interviewer
context reinstatement
cognitive interview
modified lineup procedures

Question 35

How might CCTV cameras reduce crime?

Answer 35

increased chance of being captured deters criminals
more people will be in the area as it is safer
facilitates effective security and police deployment
shows crime is taken seriously
encourages the public to be more security conscious

Question 36

What is the Bromby scale?

Answer 36

used by facial mappers to express their opinion on whether a successful match has been established; subjective opinion

Question 37

What is anthropometry?

Answer 37

takes 6 measurements of a target face, compares the angles to those of photographs

Question 38

What did Davis, Valentine and Davis find in relation to anthropometry?

Answer 38

identification was unreliable unless multiple distance and angular measurements from both views were included

Question 39

What does a magistrate’s court consist of?

Answer 39

2 or 3 magistrates, 1 judge, NO jury

Question 40

What is an adversarial system?

Answer 40

prosecution versus defence, jury assess the guilt based on evidence, judge is a passive adjudicator

Question 41

What is an inquisitorial system?

Answer 41

no jury unless a major crime, judge collects the evidence, calls witness, asks questions, the primary role is an active investigator

Question 42

What is an disadvantage to having a jury?

Answer 42

untrained amateurs; varying intelligence and knowledge of legal system
susceptible to media influences
secretive decision making process
confusion about reasonable doubt
difficulty evaluating scientific and statistical evidence

Question 43

What is an advantage to having a jury?

Answer 43

a check on state power

cultural diversity

Question 44

What did Daftly-Lapur, Dumas and Penrod find about jurors?

Answer 44

jurors over-rely on more confident others, although not necessarily more knowledgable, reliance on evidence not included in the trial, difficulty with reasonable doubt concept

Question 45

What did Kalven and Geisel find about jurors?

Answer 45

there was a good agreement between judges and jurors, where there is disagreement juries acquitted more

Question 46

What did Steblay et al. find about jurors?

Answer 46

after negative pre-trial publicity the jurors were more likely to convict and vice versa, judicial instructions to ignore ‘inadmissible’ evidence does not eliminate its effects

Question 47

What is the diagnosticity ratio?

Answer 47

the likelihood that evidence came from a particular source divided by the likelihood that it came from a different source