False Memory & Eyewitness Testimony Essay

Eyewitness testimony has long been viewed as important evidence in court cases. The general population believes eyewitness identification more than any other evidence, even if the witness account is conflicting with the other evidence presented. Studies show that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and yet it is still considered the most important form of evidence. People think that if a person says they saw something then it must have happened. Currently there are no universal guidelines on how to obtain and present such evidence. The purpose of this paper is to explain why eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and discuss the proposed guidelines on how law enforcement agencies should gather identifications, as well how

Eyewitness testimonies are based on a person’s ability to recall what took place accurately. Memory research has proven that a person’s memory is not a recording but it is reconstructive. Loftus and Palmer’s study set out to prove that the memory could be reconstructed through the use of language.

False memory refers to a phenomenon that makes an individual believe that they remember events in their lives but in real sense, these events have never occurred. In most cases, these events are traumatic, and relate to sexual abuse. False memory syndrome was postulated in 1992 in an attempt to explain the theory of adult childhood memory. Adults who remember sexual abuse events when they were young may be creating an occurrence that never happened or information that is not correct.

* Overconfidence of the eyewitness testimony: although the witness may seem and feel confident, this does not mean that their testimony or identification is correct or true.

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

Using the example of the case of Damon Thibodaux, he was taken for questioning after a girl who they were last seen with went missing. She was found strangled and naked (Leo, 2008). A homicide officer took over the case, and Thibodaux was interrogated for several hours. Although Thibodaux repeatedly said he knew nothing about the murder, the interrogation kept going, eventually the officer was able to record a statement from Thibodaux pleading guilty of consensual and non-consensual sex with the victim, beating, and assassinating her. Thibodaux was condemned to death, and was to spend fifteen years on death row and sixteen years in jail before DNA examination confirmed that he was not guilty (Kassin, 2013). Thibodauxs exoneration proceeding concluded that fatigue and exhaustion from the overnight search for the girl, the long interrogation, psychological vulnerability, and fear of the death penalty led to the false confession by Thibodaux (Leo, 2008). This case is a great example of

False memories are an apparent recollection of an event that did not actually occur. The reason why false memories happen are due to the fact that one's brains can only handle so much.There has been several experiment pertaining to the phenomenon, to find how it works.In the next part of the experiment the psychologist showed the participants a word list.False memories are very common and can happen to anyone. On very rare occasions false memories can be harmful to someone and the people around them.False memories are so common that they affect all of a person's memories. False memories can be made more clear by others memories or they could become more distorted. False memories have caused many wrongful convictions. A psychologist

False memory is a term for the event of an individual remembering information or events they were not exposed to. Jerwen and Flores (2013) defined it as the creation of a memory about an event that an individual did not experience. They point out, “although not being able to remember something is a memory problem, ‘remembering’ something that did not happen can be as serious a problem.”

Over the past few years, a group of people have been exonerated through DNA testing and most of them have been wrongfully convicted partially due to eyewitness misidentification. The role that mistaken eyewitness identifications have played in such convictions has led to huge efforts to seek ways in reducing these errors (Wells, Steblay & Dysart, 2001).

False memory, second to forgetting, is one of the two fundamental types of deformation in episodic memory (Holliday, Brainerd & Reyna, 2010). Simply stated, false memory is the propensity to account normal occurrences as being a fraction of a key experience that in actuality was not an element of that experience (Holliday, Brainerd & Reyna). False memories are something nearly everyone experience. Furthermore, false memory is defined as placed together, constructed representations of mental schemas that are incorrect (Solso, MacLin & MacLin, 2008). Individuals do not intentionally fabricate their memory. However, perceptual and social factors are a few things that a responsible for manipulating memory (Solso, MacLin & MacLin, 2008).

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

The Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony Part 1 - How reliable is Eyewitness testimony? The Reconstructive nature of memory - Schemas and Stereotypes The reconstructive nature of memory is related to the schema theory. A schema is a package of memory that is organized and developed throughout our lives.

Eyewitness identification and testimony play a huge role in the criminal justice system today, but skepticism of eyewitnesses has been growing. Forensic evidence has been used to undermine the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and the leading cause of false convictions in the United States is due to misidentifications by eyewitnesses. The role of eyewitness testimony in producing false confessions and the factors that contribute to the unreliability of these eyewitness testimonies are sending innocent people to prison, and changes are being made in order to reform these faulty identification procedures.

False Memories are fundamentally, unintended human errors, which results in people having memories of events and situations that did not actually occur. It’s worth noting that in humans there are both true and false memories, these false memories occur when a mental experience is incorrectly taken to be a representation of a past event. For example, when people are asked to describe something that happened at a particular time, people rarely deliver accurate answers. Based on research, in eyewitness testimony, the confidence people show while recalling

False memories include distorting features of events and situations or recalling facts and memories that never occurred at all (Roediger and McDermott, 1995).