Key Question - Cognitive

Question 1

What is the key question we have studied?

Answer 1

Is the eye witness testimony unreliable?

Question 2

Description

Answer 2

Eyewitness Testimony refers to the recalled memory of a witness to a crime or incident. Some argue that it is so unreliable as innocent have spent many years in jail. For example, Ronald Cotton years in prison for rape before police found DNA evidence which identified the real person. This is an issue as if the testimony is fallible then the real perpetrator is free to commit more crimes. The Delvin Report (1976) suggested that we should use EWT but only with significant corroborating evidence.

Question 3

Application

Answer 3

• The unreliability of EWT can be explained through many theories 0f memory. Firstly, reconstructive memory suggests that our memory is not a tape recorder and is not an accurate account of events. Instead, we use previously learned information when recalling what we think we have seen. A main component of this theory is the use of “schemas”. This is a previously stored parcel of information. A person might wrongly accuse a middle aged man of a crime in a pub because they are seeing a middle aged man in a pub.
  -Loftus and Palmer’s research can help explain this issue through the use of leading questions. Leading questions are finding ppts who heard different verbs gave very different accounts of how fast cars were travelling. Those who were asked “how fast the cars were going when they smashed” gave an average of 41 mph compared to only 32 mph when asked “how fast were the cars going when they contacted”
  -Another explanation could be the MSM. We may not pay attention at the time of watching an event which means it does not enter our STM. Alternatively, we may not have tried to hold more that “Millers Magic Number” of 7 items in our STM and so a lot of what we have witnessed decayed as it does not have the capacity.