Factors affecting accuracy of eyewitness testimony

Question 1

Anxiety

>Weapon-Focus Effect is the idea that..

Answer 1

In situations of high anxiety (e.g. during a bank robbery), attention is drawn to the weapon itself - rather than more important things in aiding accurate recall, such as the perpetrators face.

Question 2

Misleading questions:

Loftus and Palmers research suggests that..

Answer 2

Memory is easily distorted by questioning technique.
E.g. In the ‘Car accident film’ study, they found that participants who were asked the ‘smashed’ question produced the highest estimate of speed. Whereas those hearing ‘contacted’ gave the lowest estimate of speed.

Question 3

Age of witness can affect accuracy of eyewitness testimony. For example..

Answer 3

Own age bias > This is the idea that people do best when asked to identify people of their own age group

Question 4

Individual differences can affect accuracy of recall..

Answer 4

For example Alcohol > The more intoxicated someone is, the less attention they can allocate to peripheral tasks.

Question 5

Anxiety

>Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908) suggests that..

Answer 5

There is a curvilinear relationship between levels of arousal and performance levels.
Low arousal results in low accurate recall performance, and recall increases with arousal up to some optimum point. Then recall decreases as arousal continues to increase