week 7 - eye witnesses

Question 1

eyewitness
mistakes?

Answer 1

often
48% of wrong convictions due to misidentification

Question 2

eyewitnesses
cross racial or interacial identification harder?

Answer 2

cross racial

Question 3

eyewitnesses
cross race effect
hypothesis

Answer 3

shriver 2008
expertise hypothesis: more experience processing faces
(this is eliminated by instructing to pay close attention)
social cognitive hypothesis: more thorough processing
- also own age bias
‘in group’ faces well recognised

Question 4

eyewitnesses
cross race effect
study

Answer 4

shriver 2008
done in US all student middle class uni of Miami
black and white targets
impoverished and wealthy areas
white in wealthy identified best
–> because this was ‘in group’
not necessarily about race (in groups are key)

Question 5

factors that influence eyewitness memory

Answer 5

(stages of memory)
perpetual
encoding
storage
retrieval

Question 6

factors that influence eyewitness memory
perpetual

Answer 6

darkness, distance, duration, lighting
lighting conditions sig. influences accuracy
identification of person more than 3m away is very dubious

Question 7

factors that influence eyewitness memory
encoding

Answer 7

stress, violence
yerkes-dodson law (optimal level of arousal)
memory for central aspects of a violent event better than a non-violent one –> but worse for peripheral aspects
loftus (1979) stress causing narrowing attention
weapon focus: not just level of threat important
- unexpectedness of weapon in context
- might not remember periphery as well (faces)

Question 8

factors that influence eyewitness memory
storage - time

Answer 8

decay,
memory degrades over time
forgetting curve (ebbinghausion): sharp drop within 20 minutes and continued forgetting until levels out 2 days after event
children forget faster

Question 9

factors that influence eyewitness memory
storage - interference

Answer 9

unconscious transference: correctly rec. face but assigned incorrectly to perpetrator
–> donald thoman (on TV at time of rape)

proactive interference (info before event)
lindsay 2004
video of museum burglary - day before heard story about palace burglary or palace visit
many more errors is thematically similar story heard

Question 10

factors that influence eyewitness memory
retrieval

Answer 10

questions, expectations, misremembering
leading questions –> misinformation paradigm
1) subject views an event
2) subject exposed to misleading info. about the event
3) subject tested for recall to see if misleading info has an effect

blatant misinformation does not work -> leads to mistrust of more subtle attempts
time - if misleading info immediatley after can resist influence
people can mislead themselves - if lie after have poor recall if try to remember correctly

Question 11

eyewitnesses

in general…

Answer 11

… we perceive what we remember selectively and use imagination to fill the gaps