Factors effecting EWT Flashcards
What is eyewitness testimony?
Eyewitness testimony is evidence supplied by people who witness a specific event or crime, relying on their memory. Statements often include descriptions of the criminal and details of the crime scene, such as sequence of events, time of day and if others witnessed the even.
Post event information
Often witnesses are interviewed over a period of time after the offence and some time may pass before a case goes to trial. The experiences of the witness in this time period can have an impact on what witnesses think they saw during the offence. It can result in them providing inaccurate information at crucial times as other information can confabulate the information about the event from a number of sources. Under some conditions, exposure to this post-event information may degrade a witness’s report
Misinformation (post-event information)
The misinformation effect refers to the tendency for post-event information to interfere with the memory of the original event.
Once a person comes to believe in the memory, whether true or false, it can be difficult to change.
One possible reason for it is that participants remember the misinformation that they do not remember where they heard it - source monitoring error. Can happen when you confuse what is real and what is fantasy, or what you experienced directly with what you saw on Tv or heard from someone else.
Schemas and reconstructive memory (post-event information)
Bartlett conducted the ‘war of ghosts’ study which concluded that participants were changing unfamiliar information to make it fit their own culture and contained more and more changes with each recollection.
This has great implications for recollection of important events, such as EWT as it suggests that the reliability of such information is implicated by schemas and how they are used to recall memory.
-We tend to ignore information that is incompatible with our existing schema
-We remember the gist of the events but not necessarily the details
-Transformation (use schema-based knowledge to interpret current situations to fill in the gaps
in our memory
-use schemas to help us guess what probably happened when we cannot remember
-memories may be distorted so that events map on to existing schemas
Leading questions (post-event information)
A leading question is a question that contains information previously unknown to the witness. This information has the potential to affect the witness’ understanding of the event.
Weapon focus
Weapon focus refers to the concentration of a crime witness’s attention on a weapon and the resultant reduction in ability to remember other details of the crime. When a weapon such as a gun is present during a crime, witness recall of the offender is significantly reduced as witnesses tend to focus on the weapon not the offender. This is due to attention narrowing.
