Witnessing a Crime 1 &2 (wk 2)

Question 1

How influential is eye witness testimony in convicting victims?

Answer 1

Very influential, in the US alone 77, 000 become defendants every year solely on the basis of eye witness testimony

Question 2

What can DNA evidence tell us about eye witness testimony? What project centers around this and why has it become possible?

Answer 2

-DNA evidence only able to be analyzed in more recent times can show that eye witness testimony is not very reliable
-Many innocent people have been exonerated now on the basis of DNA evidence (this is known as the innocence project)

Question 3

What is the biggest contributor to false convictions?

Answer 3

Eye witness testimonies

Question 4

Is it possible for multiple people to give wrong eye witness accounts?

Answer 4

Yes there have been cases where all the eye witnesses say that they see the same thing but they are still wrong

Question 5

To sum out how is eye witnessing testimony described in this lecture?

Answer 5

Not reliable but persuasive

Question 6

What are the elements in the three stage theory of memory?

Answer 6

-Encoding (putting it in)
-Storage/ consolidation (keeping it there)
-Retrieval (getting it out)

Question 7

At what stage of the three stage process of memory is eye witness memory likely to be affected/ altered?

Answer 7

Memory can fall down at any stage (encoding, storage or retrieval)

Question 8

If perception is wrong to begin with what is the result of subsequent interpretation/ memory?

Answer 8

The encoding stage will be incorrect therefore, the memory formed will not b accurate

Question 9

How do we perceive our surroundings?

Answer 9

Senses

(for eye witness testimony most of the time its vision but occasionally hearing)

Question 10

Do the eyes relate to the brain like a video camera on film?

Answer 10

-No
-Once neural impulses are transported to the brain they may be further coded, reorganized and interpreted which can alter the representation/ perception

Question 11

In what ways does the brain alter perception?

Answer 11

-Looks for meaning even when there isn’t any (e.g. pareidolia)
-Your brain seeks to confirm what it believes (confirmation bias)
-Your brain makes assumptions that you may not be aware of
-Your brain is a slave to context
-Your brain interprets information in light of the information it already has

All of these can alter the perception of individuals and alter eye witness testimony to not be accurate

Question 12

What does the phrase “ the brain is a slave to context” mean?

Answer 12

-Even if you try it is impossible to see something without it’s environment/ context influencing your perception

Question 13

How can the brain interpreting information in light of what already has be bad in terms of eyewitness testimony?

Answer 13

-Can mean different eye witness’ see things in different ways
-Can alter perception

Question 14

Why has the brain evolved to see meaning where there isn’t any?

Answer 14

It’s an evolution thing. People who survived were the one’s who made quick decisions about meaning e.g. a lion in the grass

Question 15

Is perception purely physical? What other things might come into play?

Answer 15

-No

-Perceptions may be influenced by…
Past experiences
Stereotypes
Expectations
Beliefs
Knowledge

Question 16

What does the Ben/Alan example show us about about perceptions?

Answer 16

-Basically gave descriptions of a guy Ben or Alan to participants using the same words but had the words in different orders.

-The participant’s overall impression of the person (Ben/Alan) was heavily influenced by whether the first word was positive or negative

Shows us…
-First impressions are important in shaping perceptions
-People interpret information based on what they already have

Question 17

What are schemas?

Answer 17

-Schemas are beliefs and expectations concerning the nature, characteristics, behaviours, or functions of objects, people, and events

-To put it simply schemas are a blue print for what generally happens

Question 18

What do schemas drive?

Answer 18

Future behaviour

Question 19

What happens to our schemas as we develop as described by Loftus and Davis in 2007?

Answer 19

Schemas become more complex/ elaborate

(Think of a kid with a birthday party schema :as they get older they can think of more and more things that happen/ are associated with a birthday whereas previously they would have focused on one thing such as cake to sum up the entire event)

Question 20

Why can schemas being chronically active lead to error?

Answer 20

-Schemas that are important for professional functioning or our sense of self may just be active all the time without us even realizing it (they are integral to how we see the world)

-When this happens it may effect how we view incoming information in a negative way. For example, a police officer may perceive innocent happenings as crime or drug deals

Question 21

What are temporary influences on schemas and how can they lead to error?

Answer 21

-Temporary influences are acute concerns or features of the context in which a stimulus is encountered
-These temporary influences can trigger schema activation and bias how you perceive information

Question 22

What do we mean when we say schemas can be activated by statements from others?

Answer 22

-For example, you see a person running down the street normally you don’t think much of it. However, if someone yelled “stop thief” your schemas for a thief would be active and bias your perceptions of the person
-You would remember there actions as being more dodgy than you otherwise might have

Question 23

What effect can recently active schemas have? What is one way you can do this?

Answer 23

-Recently active schemas may remain active for some time and bias the processing of new information
-One way a schema could be made active is through priming

Question 24

What is the basic controversary surrounded the David Bain phone call? What does it show about priming?

Answer 24

-The 111 phone call was listened to again when the case go brought back up
-The investigator thought he heard David Bain say “ I shot the prick”
-Since then audio experts have analyzed the phone call and most deny that is what he said
-Once you are looking for “I shot the prick” you can usually hear it because your brain has been primed and this therefore bias’ you processing the information
-Is it really fair to have this presented to a jury when we now how powerful suggestion is?

Question 25

What did Fraser, 2011 do and what did they show about potential for error in the David Bain call?

Answer 25

-Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups
-Group A was primed to believe that
David Bain shot his family
-Group B was primed to believe that
David’s father shot the family
-Opinion on what was said in the audio clip was sought at 7 different time points.
-Later on in the study participants are told the opposite side i.e. if primed to believe David said “I shot the prick” phonetics experts give argument against this
-Despite this Participants’ perceptions of the tape’s contents were significantly
influenced by the information they had first been given (a lot more participants in group A claim David said “ I shot the prick” after time point 3 where they were primed). This number goes down slightly at later time points (after rebuttal) but still remains significantly higher than group B

Question 26

How many of the group B participants in Fraser, 2011 thought David said “ I shot the prick” and what does the nature of the participants say about the effect of prior knowledge/ past experiences?

Answer 26

Only four of the Group B participants (out of 190) heard David say “I shot the prick” at points 4-6:
-One was a forensic science student who had learned about the case in class (prior knowledge biasing perception of new information?)
-Two were police officers (chronic schema activation?)

Question 27

Why is having guns available/ armed police officers problematic in terms of schema error? (use examples)

Answer 27

• We know that schemas can become activated in times that are not appropriate, if a schema is chronically active or becomes active that makes us believe we are in danger having guns around can be catastrophic as schemas drive behaviour

Examples… (probs don’t have to memorise all of these)
-There are many examples of armed police officers shooting innocent people because they make an error in judgement (Jean Charles de Mendes- in Train station after London 2005 bombing)
-Oscar Pistorius case (supposedly)- shot Reeva Steenkamp (his girlfriend through door of the bathroom cause thought she was an intruder
-Trayvon Martin (George Zimmerman) shot teenager while on neighborhood because thought he was acting suss
-Hunters shooting people cause they mistake them for deer

Question 28

What did Payne, 2011 show in terms of errors in judgment and prejudice?

Answer 28

-Participants ‘primed’ with either a black or a white face (flashed on screen super fast to even register), then asked to classify objects as tools or weapons
-Those primed with a black face were quicker to categorise weapons
-When forced to respond quickly, those primed with a black face were more likely to mistakenly identify tools as weapons
-The reverse was true for those primed with a white face

-Mistakes were aligned with prejudice!!!

Question 29

What did Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbank (2002) add to research surrounding errors in perception?

Answer 29

Added the gun element to Payne, 2011’s research:
-Computer simulation, in which participants were asked to shoot only targets holding weapons
-Participants were more likely to shoot at unarmed black people than unarmed white people
-Even police officers show this bias
-Note: Black people also show the bias

Question 30

To sum up what factors can effect the perception of eyewitness’?

Answer 30

-Environmental (foggy or dark?) or health conditions (e.g. impaired vision) may impact on our perception of forensically relevant events
-Our expectations/experience may influence what we perceive, or how we interpret it

Question 31

In the encoding stage of memory can we expect all the information we see to get into our heads?

Answer 31

-No, we cannot attend to and encode everything that we experience
-So a lack of recall is not necessarily a retrieval problem

Question 32

What are some factors that can influence encoding?

Answer 32

-Attention
-Salience (importance drives attention which drives memory)
-Stress/Arousal
-Presence of a Weapon

Question 33

What are some examples of how lack of salience/ importance can effect encoding?

Answer 33

-We see the goggle letters but when you put them on a gray scale most people could not tell you what colours they were
-The gorilla video where told to count number of passes the people in white make

Question 34

What is an example of selective attention?

Answer 34

Change Blindness: where we fail to notice big changes in our environment cause we are fixated on something else

Question 35

What are some experiments that show change blindness? Why do some people notice the change and others don’t?

Answer 35

-When person changes behind the desk people don’t notice (75% of people)
-When ask someone for directions on street different person swaps out behind a painting and most of the time people don’t realize
-It’s likely to do with attention: if you were particular tuned in to the person’s shirt for example cause you liked it you would probably notice but if your mind was else where/ task focused you might not

Question 36

Is it just big changes in our environment that we don’t notice?

Answer 36

No, it can also be gradual changes. If we are not paying attention they can easily slip by unnoticed (the room scene)

Question 37

What was the experiment by Leippe, Wells, & Ostrom (1978) and what did it show about the effect of salience? How do these finding apply to the real world?

Answer 37

-Staged a theft in front of a group of students
-Thieved item was either expensive or trivial
-Eyewitnesses made more accurate identifications when the crime was perceived as more serious

-How can we be sure that results were due to increased encoding? (was it just rehearsal after the fact?)
-Manipulated whether or not the value of the expensive item was known at the time of the “robbery”
-When value knowledge was gained after the robbery, the effect was not
observed

In other words, people have to know at the time of encoding the importance of the item. This finding has real world importance as often people witness crimes without realizing until later: we can’t expect these individuals to have good memories for the event.

Question 38

What are the general views for how stress effects memory (for + against)?

Answer 38

-64% of eyewitness memory experts believe that stress has a negative effect on memory accuracy (Kassin, Tubb, Hosch, & Memon, 2002)

• Others take the approach of Yerkes Dodson Law (1908) i.e. Optimum performance for memory is in middle of stress curve at either extreme we don’t perform as well: although actual evidence is somewhat controversial

-Most people agree that stress has a negative effect on remembering details

Question 39

Why is it hard to study stress + memory in a lab setting? What would the perfect study be like?

Answer 39

-For ethical reasons we can’t expose people to trauma in a lab setting. If we ask those with trauma to recall their memories there is no way to tell if they are accurate (also who would sign up to this??)

The perfect study (near impossible):
-the situation is ecologically valid (“real life” stress)
-the experience is controllable (same for everyone)
-the degree of stress can be manipulated
-stress response is measured (either by cortisol or heart rate- something physiological)
-we can evaluate accuracy

Question 40

What did Loftus & Burns, 1982 show about the effect of stress/ arousal on performance?

Answer 40

-Showed participants a short movie of a bank robbery with either a violent or non-violent ending
-Those who watched the violent version had poorer memories for the detail seen immediately before the violence
-Disruption of memory consolidation? i.e. the memory is not cemented properly due to stress?

Question 41

What did Wessel & Merkelbach (1997) find about the effect of stress/ arousal using spiders? Why is using spiders a good method?

Answer 41

-Exposed people with or without spider phobia to a live spider in a jar
-Memory for central events did not differ between the two groups
-Spider phobic participants scored lower when asked about peripheral details
-Better than Loftus & Burn’s in terms of method cause everyone is shown the same thing (Spiders) but still have varying responses
-This suggests that stress results in narrowing in on the thing causing the stress and everything else falls away

Question 42

What did James Easterbrook (1959) say about the effects of the stress/arousal on memory? i.e. what theory did he come up with?

Answer 42

-Cue Utilization Theory
“People can only attend to a limited number of cues at any one time. As stress increases, their attention narrows to the stress-generating features.”

Question 43

Is the idea of cue utilization theory/ focusing on central stress causing details a perfect view?

Answer 43

-The “central” versus “peripheral” distinction is not without its problems
-It’s hard for us to predict what will be central for some, especially is it’s kids

Question 44

What did Morgan et al. (2004) show about the effects of stress + arousal using Elite soldier trainees?

Answer 44

-Used 500 participants because there is not as much of an ethical issue when comes to soldiers
-Soldiers were “Captured” and taken to mock POW camp
-High vs low stress interrogations
-Well-lit room, interrogator’s face visible (were told to look back at experimenter if looked away so got very good view!)
-Identification test 24 hours later
-Mistaken identifications were made by 51-68% of those under high stress, and 12-38% of those under low stress

Question 45

What is (currently) an ethical way to expose people to stress in an experiment?

Answer 45

Virtual reality

Question 46

What is the weapon focus effect and what factors are believed to influence it?

Answer 46

-Visual attention that eyewitnesses give to the perpetrator’s weapon during
the course of a crime. Using ideology of the cue utilization theory the gun becomes the central feature and everything else falls away
-Is it context or arousal that leads to selective attention being placed on the gun or a combo of both?

Question 47

What did : Loftus, Loftus, & Messo (1987)
find when they tried to investigate whether the weapon focus effect was due to arousal or not?

Answer 47

-Basic premise: If weapon focus effect is due to stress there should not be a weapon focus effect when there is no stress

Method:
-Participants saw slides of a customer pulling out either a chequebook or a handgun
-Participants made more correct identifications in the no weapon condition
-Participants made more and longer eye fixations on the gun than on the chequebook
-Even in harmless situations, witnesses’ eyes are automatically drawn to a weapon

Conclusions:
-The weapon focus effect is not just due to arousal because when stress/arousal was taken away it still occurred however, that does not mean stress/ arousal has no effect at all just that it is not the only contributor

Question 48

What did Pickel (1999) show when they tried to investigate the importance of context with regards to the weapon focus effect?

Answer 48

-Participants saw slides of a target dressed either as a policeman or a priest, and carrying either a gun or a cellphone
-Priest holding the gun= out of context (weirdest)
-Witnesses were less accurate in describing the priest when he carried a gun
-Memory accuracy for the policeman did not differ according to the prop that he carried
-Conclusion: When object was out of context there is a decrease in performance
Context does have an impact of the weapon focus effect

Question 49

To summarize what factors effect the weapon focus effect?

Answer 49

-Not solely due stress/ arousal
-Context

Both of these influence….
-Selective attention

Question 50

Can encoding strength vary or is it just a yes/no as to whether it happens or not?

Answer 50

-Think about encoding as a continuum: strength of encoding can vary

Question 51

What factors effect encoding strength?

Answer 51

-Age (tend to be better with age: encode more details)
-Salience
-Knowledge (helps us organise our perceptions which leads to better memories)

Question 52

To summarize what are the implications for eyewitness’ in terms of the first process of memory formation: encoding?

Answer 52

-Sometimes we can’t remember things simply because they were never
encoded in the first place
-Numerous factors influence whether or not perceived information is encoded
-Numerous factors influence how strongly information is encoded