P1 - eye witness testimony

Question 1

3 stages of EWT

Answer 1

1) The witness encodes info into LTM (the event and the person involved), may be partial as the event occurs quickly, at night and accompanied by rapid, violent, complex action.
2) Witness retains info for a time. Memories may be lost or modified during retention, other activities may interfere with the memory itself.
3) Witness retrieves memory from storage. What happens next is there may be a presence or absence of info that may affect the accuracy of the memory.

Question 2

factors affecting the EWT (2)

Answer 2

The main factors affecting accuracy of memory can be placed into two categories:

Witness factors: age, race, gender and individual response to anxiety or stress.

Event factors: duration of event and level of violence witnessed.

We will be looking at the effect of misleading information, post event discussion and anxiety.

Question 3

one reason for the accuracy of EWT being so poor

Answer 3

One reason why the accuracy of EWT is often very poor could be because of leading questions used by the police after the event. Information received after an event can have a retroactive interfering effect on our recollection; in other words, retroactive interference occurs when later learning interferes with previous learning; i.e., incoming information gets integrated and confused with our existing knowledge.

Question 4

study that supports the EWT theory

Answer 4

Research Study- Loftus and Palmer (1974)

Reconstruction of automobile destruction: an example of the interaction between language and memory.

Aims

Loftus and Palmer’s experiment was actually two experiments. They wanted to investigate in general how accurate or inaccurate memory was. Specifically they wanted to see the effect of wording upon estimates of speed.

Experiment 1: How fast were the cars going?

To see if the speed estimates given by participants upon watching a video of a car crash would be influenced by the wording of the question asked. They wanted to see if participants who were asked a question with the word “hit” in it would give a different estimate of speed than those who were asked the same question but with the word “smashed”.

Procedure

Number and make-up of participants

Research method used 
Laboratory experiment 
Experimental design 
Independent measures 
Independent variable 
 Word used (verb in crucial question) 
Dependent variable 
 The estimated speed

Question 5

evaluation of loftus research (negative)

Answer 5

The main limitation of Loftus and Palmer’s research was that it lacked external validity.

Yulle and Cutshall found that witnesses to a real life shooting appeared to have little effect when told misleading information

Emotions effect on the reaction – not same as in the real environment, rely less on peoples input and more on own memories.

Flashbulb memories make the memory more vivid

Demand characteristics?
Some psychologists have argued that Loftus’s results could be explained by demand characteristics
It has been suggested that the verb would have been easy to identify as the IV. Therefore, the results reflected participants trying to support Loftus’s hypothesis rather how they would have estimated speed in everyday life

Loftus addressed these (DC) criticisms in a follow up study Loftus (1980).
She found… that participants still made errors despite being told that they would earn money
This shows… that demand characteristics in the experiment in the form of money did not influence the accuracy. Misleading questions still influenced participants.

Question 6

evaluation of loftus research (positive)

Answer 6

It can be argued that Loftus; research is high in internal validity and is highly replicable

Clear variables so can be replicated easily, lab experiment, no extraneous variables (controlled the questions and script of the questions asked)

Video they watch can be replicated (they see the same things)

A great strength of all research into misleading information is that it has hugely important practical uses in the real world, where the consequence of inaccurate EWT can be serious. E.g. Loftus (1975) believes that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be very careful how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses. See cognitive interviews.

Question 7

study into effects of anxiety and cue utilization hypothesis

Answer 7

Easterbrook (1959) put forward the cue-utilisation hypothesis. The idea is that the presence of a threat (e.g. weapon) would naturally increase a witness’s level of anxiety, which in turn would decrease the witness’ attention capacity. This means that people will focus on central cues (e.g. knife) rather than peripheral cues (e.g. face) in the environment as the weapon is the ultimate source of information (Kramer, 1990).

The Cue has been applied to research related to the accuracy of eye witness testimony. Psychologists and lawyers refer to a phenomenon called “weapon focus.” Weapon focus refers to the concentration of some witness’s attention on a weapon during a crime leaving less attention available for viewing other items (Loftus, 1979)

Knife accuracy 33%
Pen accuracy 49%

It is thought that weapon focus is linked to anxiety. The theory being that the presence of the weapon intensifies the anxiety caused by the crime, which leads to reduced accuracy.

Question 8

study to contradict the theory of cue dependent hypothesis

Answer 8

Christianson and Hubinette (1993)

Victims of genuine bank robberies were more accurate in their recall than bystanders.

Supports flash-able memories more than cue hypothesis