Forensic Flashcards

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1
Q

What are episodic memories?

A
  • These are memories for personally experienced events.

- They contain details of the time and situation in which they were acquired

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2
Q

What are the 3 stages of memory processing?

A
  1. Stage 1: Acquisition/Encoding information- Information the person perceives
  2. Stage 2: Storage/ Retention- Information the person stores in memory
  3. Stage 3: Retrieval- Information the person retrieves at a later time (eg: Interview)
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3
Q

What factors affects the quality of information that is encoded in memory? (5)

A
  • 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
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4
Q

What is bottom up processing?

A
  • 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.
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5
Q

What is top-down processing?

A
  • Sensory information is interpreted in light of prior knowledge, concepts and expectations
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6
Q

What did Bugelski and Alampay (1961) find? (Top down processing)

A
  • 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
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7
Q

What did Bransford and Johnson (1972) find out about scripts?

What is schema theory?

A
  • 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)
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8
Q

What does the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve show?

A
  • As time increases, our forgetfulness increases and we can believe events to be true even if they weren’t
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9
Q

What is encoding specificity?

A
  • 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
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10
Q

What did Goddon & Baddeley (1975) find in relation to encoding specificity?

A

Reinstating the physical context in which participants encoded a list of words helped participants to remember

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11
Q

What did Fisher find when analysing police interviews?

What did effect these have on the witnesses

A
  • 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
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12
Q

What is confirmatory bias?

A

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

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13
Q

What are the 4 stages of the cognitive interview?

A
  1. Mental context reinstatement- recall information in the same context as they saw the event in
  2. Report everything- Full recall without interruption
  3. Reverse order- Repeat story in a different order to minimise ‘filling in effects’ of scripts
  4. Change perspectives- Give account from another perspective
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14
Q

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)

A

Those interviewed using the cognitive interview produced more correct information than those interviewed normally

-47%

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15
Q

What are the 7 sins of memory?

A
  1. Transience
  2. Absent-midnedness
  3. Blocking
  4. Misattribution
  5. Suggestibility
  6. Bias
  7. Persistence
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16
Q

What is transience?

What is an example of this?

A

The decreasing ability to retrieve and access memories over time

Eg: Forggeting a phone number

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17
Q

What are flashbulb memories?

Give some examples

A
  • Distinct, vivid, detailed memories, often for some sort of public event
  • The death of princess Diana, 9/11
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18
Q

What did Talarico and Rubin find about flashbulb memories?

A

Flashbulb memories are no more vivid than normal memories as they decay in the same way

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19
Q

What is the phonological loop and what is it used for?

A
  • Central component of the working memory model- the store of verbal information
  • Responsible for ‘inner speech’
  • Most people can remember 7±2 items
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20
Q

What is evidence for the phonological loop? (3)

A
  • Phonological similar effect
  • Unattended speech effect
  • Word length effect
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21
Q

What part of the brain is crucial in memory formation?

A

The Hippocampus

Patient HM showed that the STM and LTM are separate

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22
Q

What is one way of reducing transience?

A

Deep processing: Learning the meaning of things rather than trying to store memory information without meaning

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23
Q

What is absentmindedness?

A
  • Tending to forget or fail to notice things

- Eg: Going upstairs for something and forgetting what you went up for

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24
Q

What did Jennings and Jacoby find about absentmindedness?

A
  • Older adults are much more absent minded than young adults
  • Adults have less brain capacity to pay attention to encoding in tasks = poorer recall
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25
Q

What is blocking?

A

Temporarily forgetting information

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26
Q

How is blocking different from transience?

A
  • The information has been encoded

- The information is still stored

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27
Q

How is blocking different from absentmindedness?

A
  • The information has been encoded

- You are often able to retrieve partial information

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28
Q

What is misattribution?

A
  • The ability to remember information correctly, but attributing it to the wrong source.
  • Eg: Oklahoma bombing- John Doe 2
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29
Q

What is the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm?

A
  • 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
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30
Q

What did Bernstein, Laney, Morris, & Loftus find about false memory?

A
  • 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
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31
Q

What is suggestibility?

A
  • Incorporation of external information into personal recollection
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32
Q

What did Loftus and Palmer’s experiment find?

A
  • 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
33
Q

What is consistency bias?

A

The commonly held idea that we are more consistent in our attitudes, opinions, and beliefs than we actually are

34
Q

What is persistence?

What part of the brain plays a crucial role?

A
  • The inability to prevent the recollection of unwanted memories

EG: Post traumatic stress disorder, catchy songs

  • Amgdala
35
Q

What are key findings in regard to free recall with child witnesses?

A
  • 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
36
Q

What is the difference between open and closed questions and what are their effects?

A
  • 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)

37
Q

What are the effects of nonsensical questions?

A
  • 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
38
Q

What did Poole and White find in relation to repeated questioning?

A
  • 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
39
Q

What is interrogative suggestibility?

A

The extent to which, an individual accepts information communicated during formal questioning

40
Q

What is misinformation effects?

What did Bruck et al find in relation to this?

A
  • When misleading information is incorporated into one’s memory after an event
  • Misleading suggestions often incorporated into children’s reports
41
Q

What is autosuggestion

A

An unconscious adoption of an idea that influences one’s beliefs

42
Q

What are some explanations for suggestibility effects?

A
  1. The vacant slot hypothesis
  2. The co-existence hypothesis
  3. Demand characteristics hypothesis
  4. The substitution hypothesis
  5. The response bias
  6. The course monitoring hypothesis
43
Q

What did Leaner find when reporting child abuse?

A
  • 2nd and 3rd interviews generated more information about sexual acts
  • Repeating questions can increase accuracy
44
Q

What did Goodman and Ruby find? (Clown)

A
  • 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
45
Q

What 4 things do faces provide information about?

A
  • Identification
  • Gender
  • Attractiveness
  • Emotional expression
46
Q

What are negative images harder to recognise?

A
  • Loss of shading

- Lighting an image from below has a similar effect

47
Q

What does the Thatcher illusion show?

A
  • 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
48
Q

What did Shapiro & Penrod find about gender differences for witnesses?

A
  • Little difference but females slightly more likely to make better identifications
49
Q

What is the other (race) effect?

A

Where you are better at identifying people from your own race than others

50
Q

What were the findings of Henderson, Bruce and Burton?

What were the findings of their follow up study?

A
  • 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%
51
Q

What did Wilkinson and Evans find in relation to facial imagery experts?

A
  • Matched CCTV images to photographs
  • Compared facial imagery experts and the public
  • Accuracy was doubled and error rate halved
52
Q

Why was the Royal commission on criminal justice set up?

A
  • Following the Birmingham siz convictions of murder
  • 4/6 gave false confessions and served 16 years in prison
  • Aim to improve criminal justice system
53
Q

What is an interrogation?

A
  • Has the intention to illicit a confession from the defendant
54
Q

What is PACE?

When was it set up?

A
  • Police and Criminal evidence act
  • Law in the UK where tape recording of suspect interviews is mandatory
  • 1984
55
Q

Who did Gudjonsson propose are more vulnerable to giving false confessions?

A
  • People with mental illnesses
  • Abnormal mental state
  • Low IQ
  • Children
56
Q

What is a voluntary false confession?

A
  • A voluntary false confession occurs in the absence of any obvious external pressure from others.
57
Q

What are 2 styles of coping response to questioning?

A
  1. Logical, realistic approach- resistance to interrogators pressure to confess
  2. Passive, helpless stance- more suceptible to giving into pressure
58
Q

What is coerced compliance?

A

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

59
Q

What is coerced internalisation?

A

Both publicly and privately, the suspect comes to agree with the interrogator’s version of events

60
Q

What did Penrod and Cutler find about witness confidence?

A
  • The witness was either 100% confident or only 80% confident
  • Confidence is poor predictor of accuracy
  • Jurors overbelieve EWT
61
Q

What is the Halo effect?

What effect does this have on eyewitness testimony?

A
  • What is beautiful is good

- Attractive people receive lower sentences

62
Q

What is story model?

A

Creating storylike accounts of events- jurors make decisions based upon how plausible the story is

63
Q

What is dual process theory

A

Systematic processing- careful thinking

Heuristic processing- mental shortcuts

64
Q

What os the contempt of court act (1981)?

A

UK law making it an offence to publish anything that will prejudice the criminal justice system

65
Q

What is groupthink?

A

When a groups primary aim is to obtain a unanimous decsion over seeking the truth

66
Q

What did Farrington find?

A

20% of boys were convited under 18

40% were convicted by 40

67
Q

What were Farrington’s 6 predictive factors?

A
  1. Antisocial behaviour
  2. Hyperactivity
  3. Low intelligence and poor school attainment
  4. Family criminality
  5. Family poverty
  6. Harsh parenting style
68
Q

Moffit’s taxonomy

What were his 3 groups?

A
  • Adolescent-limited- offend between puberty-adolesent
  • Life-couse persistent- early onset of criminality, lone offenders
  • Abstainers- never engage in offending behaviour
69
Q

What is the difference between primary and secondary anti-socials?

A

Primary: Criminal behaviour –> Drug use
Secondary: Drug use –> Criminal behaviour

70
Q

What is the Buss-Perry aggression questionnaire?

A
  • Tests level of aggression on a scale 0-5
71
Q

What did Smith and Waterman find in relation to violent offenders?

A
  • 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
72
Q

How many people suffer from domestic abuse?

A

1.6 million

73
Q

What percentage of 16-59 year olds have tried drugs?

What percentage of 16-24 years olds have tried drugs?

A
  • 35% (11.7 million)

- 34.7 (2.2 million)

74
Q

What are static risks?

A

Reflective of the individual, unchangeable factors such as age, gender and criminal history

75
Q

What are dynamic risks?

A

Substance abuse, beliefs, medication non-compliance.

76
Q

What is the difference between inductive and deductive profiling?

A
  • 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
77
Q

What is behaviour consistency?

A
  • Offenders have consistent behavioural traits. They will commit crimes in the same way actions influence life-style and personality
78
Q

What is homology assumption?

A
  • The more similar two offenders are, the more similar will their offences be
79
Q

What are Ainsworth’s 2 reasons why prisons are not effective?

A
  • 95% who commit a crime not convicted.

- Those convicted go to prison months after the crime committed, so does not work in behaviourist terms