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
What did Loftus and Palmer’s experiment find?
- Shows how easy it is to distort memories through suggestion and leading questions
- Ps gave higher estimated speeds for the car when the verb ‘smashed’ was used
What is consistency bias?
The commonly held idea that we are more consistent in our attitudes, opinions, and beliefs than we actually are
What is persistence?
What part of the brain plays a crucial role?
- The inability to prevent the recollection of unwanted memories
EG: Post traumatic stress disorder, catchy songs
- Amgdala
What are key findings in regard to free recall with child witnesses?
- Children gave little false information in free recall.
- Most distressed children gave the most accurate reports
- Children give accurate, although often limited and lacking in detail information in free recall
What is the difference between open and closed questions and what are their effects?
- Open questions: Enable respondent to answer in as much detail as they want, in their own words- has little suggestibility, which is good as it is more accurate(Less effecctive with younger children)
Closed questions: Force respondent to answer based upon answers already fit into categories predetermined by the questioner eg: Yes or No. This gives respondent no opportunity for elaboration with the belief that there is a right answer (Less accurate)
What are the effects of nonsensical questions?
- Children do not ask for clarification and often answer even if they do not understand
- Repeating the question may force them to choose an answer
- More likely to say ‘I don’t know’ when interviewer is absent
What did Poole and White find in relation to repeated questioning?
- Open questions, even when repeated, yield good accuracy
- Closed questions, when repeated: younger children likely to change their response both within and across interviews
- After repetition of questions ps became more confident in inacuurate answers
What is interrogative suggestibility?
The extent to which, an individual accepts information communicated during formal questioning
What is misinformation effects?
What did Bruck et al find in relation to this?
- When misleading information is incorporated into one’s memory after an event
- Misleading suggestions often incorporated into children’s reports
What is autosuggestion
An unconscious adoption of an idea that influences one’s beliefs
What are some explanations for suggestibility effects?
- The vacant slot hypothesis
- The co-existence hypothesis
- Demand characteristics hypothesis
- The substitution hypothesis
- The response bias
- The course monitoring hypothesis
What did Leaner find when reporting child abuse?
- 2nd and 3rd interviews generated more information about sexual acts
- Repeating questions can increase accuracy
What did Goodman and Ruby find? (Clown)
- Pairs of 4 & 7-yr-olds in caravan with stranger, who dressed one child in clown costume, lifted & photographed him / her. Other child observed.
- Interviewed 10 days later (both open & misleading q’s)
- Few differences in accuracy of bystander and participator
- 7 yr old more accurate than 4 yr olds on all questions except misleading ones that implied abuse
What 4 things do faces provide information about?
- Identification
- Gender
- Attractiveness
- Emotional expression
What are negative images harder to recognise?
- Loss of shading
- Lighting an image from below has a similar effect
What does the Thatcher illusion show?
- Inversion effect makes viewers less sensitive to configurable information compared to upright faces
- When eyes and mouth of Thatcher was inverted and presented upside down, the picture looks normal, however when presented the right way up it looks wrong
What did Shapiro & Penrod find about gender differences for witnesses?
- Little difference but females slightly more likely to make better identifications
What is the other (race) effect?
Where you are better at identifying people from your own race than others
What were the findings of Henderson, Bruce and Burton?
What were the findings of their follow up study?
- Matching faces from CCTV is clearly diffiicult- high error rates
- Matching photos to photos improves to 76% for Robber
- When robber was disguised (wearing a hat) reduced accuracy to 42.5% compared to 63.5%
What did Wilkinson and Evans find in relation to facial imagery experts?
- Matched CCTV images to photographs
- Compared facial imagery experts and the public
- Accuracy was doubled and error rate halved
Why was the Royal commission on criminal justice set up?
- Following the Birmingham siz convictions of murder
- 4/6 gave false confessions and served 16 years in prison
- Aim to improve criminal justice system
What is an interrogation?
- Has the intention to illicit a confession from the defendant
What is PACE?
When was it set up?
- Police and Criminal evidence act
- Law in the UK where tape recording of suspect interviews is mandatory
- 1984
Who did Gudjonsson propose are more vulnerable to giving false confessions?
- People with mental illnesses
- Abnormal mental state
- Low IQ
- Children
What is a voluntary false confession?
- A voluntary false confession occurs in the absence of any obvious external pressure from others.
What are 2 styles of coping response to questioning?
- Logical, realistic approach- resistance to interrogators pressure to confess
- Passive, helpless stance- more suceptible to giving into pressure
What is coerced compliance?
The suspect remains aware that their confession and private, internal knowledge of the event disagree, but the suspect nevertheless comes to agree with the interrogator
What is coerced internalisation?
Both publicly and privately, the suspect comes to agree with the interrogator’s version of events
What did Penrod and Cutler find about witness confidence?
- The witness was either 100% confident or only 80% confident
- Confidence is poor predictor of accuracy
- Jurors overbelieve EWT
What is the Halo effect?
What effect does this have on eyewitness testimony?
- What is beautiful is good
- Attractive people receive lower sentences
What is story model?
Creating storylike accounts of events- jurors make decisions based upon how plausible the story is
What is dual process theory
Systematic processing- careful thinking
Heuristic processing- mental shortcuts
What os the contempt of court act (1981)?
UK law making it an offence to publish anything that will prejudice the criminal justice system
What is groupthink?
When a groups primary aim is to obtain a unanimous decsion over seeking the truth
What did Farrington find?
20% of boys were convited under 18
40% were convicted by 40
What were Farrington’s 6 predictive factors?
- Antisocial behaviour
- Hyperactivity
- Low intelligence and poor school attainment
- Family criminality
- Family poverty
- Harsh parenting style
Moffit’s taxonomy
What were his 3 groups?
- Adolescent-limited- offend between puberty-adolesent
- Life-couse persistent- early onset of criminality, lone offenders
- Abstainers- never engage in offending behaviour
What is the difference between primary and secondary anti-socials?
Primary: Criminal behaviour –> Drug use
Secondary: Drug use –> Criminal behaviour
What is the Buss-Perry aggression questionnaire?
- Tests level of aggression on a scale 0-5
What did Smith and Waterman find in relation to violent offenders?
- Dot probe and troop effect task
- Violently themed stimuli is more salient for aggressive people
- Violent offenders showed a significant bias towards aggression in both tasks
How many people suffer from domestic abuse?
1.6 million
What percentage of 16-59 year olds have tried drugs?
What percentage of 16-24 years olds have tried drugs?
- 35% (11.7 million)
- 34.7 (2.2 million)
What are static risks?
Reflective of the individual, unchangeable factors such as age, gender and criminal history
What are dynamic risks?
Substance abuse, beliefs, medication non-compliance.
What is the difference between inductive and deductive profiling?
- Inductive: Expert skills and knowledge of profiler- give snippets of information to a profiler and they can work the criminal
- Deductive: Forensic evidence, crime scene, offence-related- more widely used
What is behaviour consistency?
- Offenders have consistent behavioural traits. They will commit crimes in the same way actions influence life-style and personality
What is homology assumption?
- The more similar two offenders are, the more similar will their offences be
What are Ainsworth’s 2 reasons why prisons are not effective?
- 95% who commit a crime not convicted.
- Those convicted go to prison months after the crime committed, so does not work in behaviourist terms
