Forensic Flashcards
What are episodic memories?
- These are memories for personally experienced events.
- They contain details of the time and situation in which they were acquired
What are the 3 stages of memory processing?
- Stage 1: Acquisition/Encoding information- Information the person perceives
- Stage 2: Storage/ Retention- Information the person stores in memory
- Stage 3: Retrieval- Information the person retrieves at a later time (eg: Interview)
What factors affects the quality of information that is encoded in memory? (5)
- Exposure duration- How long you see the culprit
- Crime seriousness- Events with high emotionality are remembered more clearly
- Violence
- Weapon presence- More likely to focus attention to the weapon
- Perpetrator characteristics e.g. Disguises- Less likely to remember unfamiliar faces accurately
What is bottom up processing?
- Data driven
- Begins with image that falls on the retina
- Information is transmitted up to higher levels of the visual system until the object is perceived.
What is top-down processing?
- Sensory information is interpreted in light of prior knowledge, concepts and expectations
What did Bugelski and Alampay (1961) find? (Top down processing)
- People were more likely to perceive rat-man ambiguous figure as a rat if they were exposed to animal pictures first
- Evidence of perceptual set
What did Bransford and Johnson (1972) find out about scripts?
What is schema theory?
- Scripts help us to remember information
- Giving a memorable title relating to a script it increases people’s ability to remember
- We remember items better if they fit with our schemas and previous experiences (schema theory)
What does the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve show?
- As time increases, our forgetfulness increases and we can believe events to be true even if they weren’t
What is encoding specificity?
- What is remembered later depends on the similarity of the retrieval situation to the original encoding conditions
- The more similar they are the most likely you will remember
What did Goddon & Baddeley (1975) find in relation to encoding specificity?
Reinstating the physical context in which participants encoded a list of words helped participants to remember
What did Fisher find when analysing police interviews?
What did effect these have on the witnesses
- Police would interrup witness’s narrative, and use closed/leading and suggestive questions
- Interrupted witness’s concentration, discourage elaboration, restrict the witness to reporting requested information only, and encourage the use of ineffective and superficial retrieval attempts
What is confirmatory bias?
The tendency to interpret information that confirms one’s preconceptions/beliefs
eg: If police answer witness’s questions that they already believe they know the answer to
What are the 4 stages of the cognitive interview?
- Mental context reinstatement- recall information in the same context as they saw the event in
- Report everything- Full recall without interruption
- Reverse order- Repeat story in a different order to minimise ‘filling in effects’ of scripts
- Change perspectives- Give account from another perspective
What did Gieselman et al find in relation to the cognitive interview?
What percentage of people interviewed with the CI elicited more information? (Fisher/Gieselman)
Those interviewed using the cognitive interview produced more correct information than those interviewed normally
-47%
What are the 7 sins of memory?
- Transience
- Absent-midnedness
- Blocking
- Misattribution
- Suggestibility
- Bias
- Persistence
What is transience?
What is an example of this?
The decreasing ability to retrieve and access memories over time
Eg: Forggeting a phone number
What are flashbulb memories?
Give some examples
- Distinct, vivid, detailed memories, often for some sort of public event
- The death of princess Diana, 9/11
What did Talarico and Rubin find about flashbulb memories?
Flashbulb memories are no more vivid than normal memories as they decay in the same way
What is the phonological loop and what is it used for?
- Central component of the working memory model- the store of verbal information
- Responsible for ‘inner speech’
- Most people can remember 7±2 items
What is evidence for the phonological loop? (3)
- Phonological similar effect
- Unattended speech effect
- Word length effect
What part of the brain is crucial in memory formation?
The Hippocampus
Patient HM showed that the STM and LTM are separate
What is one way of reducing transience?
Deep processing: Learning the meaning of things rather than trying to store memory information without meaning
What is absentmindedness?
- Tending to forget or fail to notice things
- Eg: Going upstairs for something and forgetting what you went up for
What did Jennings and Jacoby find about absentmindedness?
- Older adults are much more absent minded than young adults
- Adults have less brain capacity to pay attention to encoding in tasks = poorer recall
What is blocking?
Temporarily forgetting information
How is blocking different from transience?
- The information has been encoded
- The information is still stored
How is blocking different from absentmindedness?
- The information has been encoded
- You are often able to retrieve partial information
What is misattribution?
- The ability to remember information correctly, but attributing it to the wrong source.
- Eg: Oklahoma bombing- John Doe 2
What is the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm?
- Participants study a list of words (eg: dream, night, pillow) that are related to a lure word (eg: Sleep).
- They are then given a recognition test containing studied words, unrelated words and new words.
- Participants frequently claim that they previously studies the related lure words
What did Bernstein, Laney, Morris, & Loftus find about false memory?
- False beliefs about fattening foods can have healthy consequences
- 20% of participants believed in the false memory and showed more avoidance of strawberry ice cream
What is suggestibility?
- Incorporation of external information into personal recollection