Eyewitness Testimonies

The aim of Loftus and Palmer’s study was to investigate how language can be used to manipulate or distort one’s memory in an eyewitness testimony.

Throughout history, there have been many misjudgments, mistakes, and wrongful accusations toward people from various different factors. A great deal of controversy has been directed towards the criminal justice system in which scientists pose questions on whether or not the procedures are valid. It is imperative to understand how the brain malfunctions regarding to memory reconstruction, encoding failures, and other environmental factors that negatively impact the justice system. One of the procedures called lineups or photo arrays are used in order to have eyewitnesses identify a subject guilty of a crime. In the lineups, subjects are lined up while the accuser has to choose an individual that they believe committed the crime. Using the same idea with the photo arrays, the victim will choose from a set of pictures of subjects (Weir, 2016). Many scientists question the validity of eyewitnesses because of all these factors that impact memories. This has lead to a substantial amount of wrongfully convicted individuals by the eyewitness which is a huge issue in the system (Weir, 2016). It is crucial to be knowledgeable of the factors that can impede memory. The person that actually committed the crime should be held responsible for their actions, not only for justice, but for the safety of others as well.

There are many different factors that play a part in the increased chance of a witness correctly identifying a suspect. Such factors should be brought to the attention of the jury and the judge to help in properly assessing whether a witness is correctly identifying a suspect. A study by Magnussen, Melinder, Stridbeck, & Raja (2010) found that of the three different types of people: judge, jury, and general public, that for the most part all where fairly ill-informed on the reliability of eyewitness testimony with judges having the most. Judges only had about an 8% difference in knowledge when compared to jurors. With this information it is very clear that education on the reliability of eyewitness testimony needs to become more of a general knowledge information for the everyone, especially people who are involved in upholding the law. Another factor to look into when evaluating the accuracy eyewitness testimony is the role that memory plays. Memory is divided into three processes: perceiving, remembering, and recalling information (Simmonsen, 2013). There is plenty of room in all three of those stages to forget or falsely remember something. Some factors that play a part when a person perceives an event is the amount of time they are exposed to the event and the suspect. A study conducted by Horry, Halford, Brewer, Milne, & Bull. (2014) found that witnesses were increasingly more likely to correctly identify a suspect if they had been exposed to the suspect for sixty

Researcher Elizabeth Loftus, encapsulated the reliability of human memory and the notion about the inaccuracy of eyewitness accounts. She hypothesized that if eyewitnesses are asked questions with false presuppositions, the erroneous information will be incorporated into the witness’s memory and alter the memory of the witnessed event.

Allport, Postman (1947) and Loftus (1974) also support Bartlett’s idea of reconstructive memory. Loftus mainly focused on the reliability of eyewitness testimonies. As done in this experiment, Loftus and Palmer conducted a study on the effects of wording a question differently and how that would affect the answer. In the experiment the researchers used two different verbs on two different test groups. One was “contact” the other was “smashed”. The effect of this was a change in the speed estimated by the participants. The verb “contact” gave an average speed of 32mph while the verb “smash” gave an average of 41 mph in the experiment conducted by Loftus. There is a positive correlation between word use and how memory is retrieved because of it.

False memory can be defined as a person believing they remember something that did not actually happen (Loftus, 1997). It is a common misconception that human memories are accurate and reliable (Poston, 2014), though many studies have revealed the reconstructive nature of memory and its vulnerability to distortion (e.g., Frenda, Nichols, & Loftus, 2011; Nash & Wade, 2008). This misconception forms an integral part of the modern justice system. Judges, attournies and juries are all prone to believe testimony from a confident eyewitness (Van Wallendael et al., 2007) and legal confessions are considered among the most compelling forms of evidence (e.g., Cutler, 2012; Kassin, Bogart, & Kerner, 2012). But what happens when these legal statements are based on false memories?

Research into false memory has been carried out to determine how reliable the memory can be. Loftus (2003) looked at eyewitness memory and how accurate it can be. In one study Loftus showed films of traffic

Post-event misleading information and false memory have some serious implications for both eyewitness testimony and therapy situations, which can be false charges, the ruining of people's lives and reputations. Misinformation has the power for invading our memories when we talk to other people, when we are interrogated intensively, or when we read or view coverage on an event that we may have personally experienced. After more than two decades of researching the power of misinformation, it has been shown that memories are easily modified, can be extremely dangerous.

I will be discussing is eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony refers to an account given by people of an event they have witnessed. Eyewitness testimony has been researched by many people, but Elizabeth Loftus was a major part in showing people that memory can be changed by suggestion. Remembering what happened in an accident or crime can be a major factor in an investigation. Loftus’s study showed that when people are being questioned about an event just the vocabulary used can affect their answers to a question. This shows not all information is accurate. It can limit an investigation and the outcome of a case. This has positively impacted my life because if I ever ask someone about what happened my words could affect their answers and

Memory is a reconstructive process, where someone recall information from the past that will be their autobiography and it can be affected by many different factors, and according to the first study provided below, all memories are wrong to some extent. But what is important for memories is whether we can differentiate between accurate and inaccurate ones. The first study has tested two different approaches on subjects, and neither were helpful in determining the validity of a memory. On the other hand, in the fourth study it was concluded that it is possible to assess whether a particular eyewitness is true or false based on the approach the witness used to recall the information. Also, it was found in the third research that subjects were

The purpose of this article is to examine the likelihood and reasoning behind conformity of memory as it relates to eyewitness accounts. Researchers are interested in knowing under what conditions a person’s memory is likely to be distorted or do they falsely remember because they believe their partner to be correct.

Memory has been a subject of study to see if what we remember is a true memory or a false memory. Some of the studies conducted on this have used sentences, prose, films and slides to test the memory and find out if the individual can recall the actual story or have false memories about what they experienced (Roediger III & McDermott, 1995, p. 803). The problem arises when eyewitnesses recall information about an event but proves to be false. Roediger, Jacoby and McDermott state that when you test the memory you are not just testing the retention of that event, you are also changing how the individual retains that particular event in the future.

Eyewitness accounts are continuously put into question in the court room. By studying how memory works and what factors influence what we remember, we can try to determine how credible eyewitness accounts are and if they are an accurate source of evidence in crimes.

Eyewitness testimony is a legal term and refers to an account given by people that they have witnessed. For example, an individual may be required to give a description at a trial of a robbery or a road accident someone has seen (Simply Psychology, 2009). This includes, but isn’t limited to, identification of perpetrators and details of the crime scene. Eyewitness memory is a form of episodic memory; episodic memories are memories of past events that are situated in a specific time and place (Thorley, 2013). Furthermore, having participant’s study and recollect stimuli such as word lists, stories, and mock crimes can help assess episodic memory.

Children were once scrutinised as being dangerously unreliable witnesses, reports provided by children are often questioned on their reliability, due to children’s heightened susceptibility to suggestion, limited memory capacity and their far-fetched imagination. In the past, as courts have been a habitually adult-based environment, courts have lacked any recognition of the needs of children (Hritz et al, 2015). Eyewitnesses are individuals who have seen, heard, or hold any information regarding a criminal offence (Close, 2013). According to the NSPCC, there is a heightened number of child abuse cases year upon year, in which children are increasingly being used as eyewitnesses, due to being the sole witnesses (Bentley et al, 2017). This essay