The Multi Store Model Of Memory And Research Into Eyewitness Testimony

One of the reasons that eyewitness evidence is so unreliable is because human memory is very open to suggestion. In fact, just asking about something can alter our memory. (1) For example, in the 80-90’s, many psychotherapists were

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.

The cognitive interview increases the credibility of eyewitness testimony by decreasing memory error and confabulations.

However, factors such as interactions with other witnesses and the influence of media outlets cannot be accounted for. In addition, the small sample size of 13 participants means the results are not as reliable and cannot be generalised to the population at large. One possible factor which may influence the results is that witnesses were within close proximity to the events which transpired which can influence memory as well as not being applicable to many crimes whereby the witnesses only see part of the crime or a shadow of the perpetrator. An alternative explanation would be that flashbulb memory was at work here.

In the late 19th-century research on eyewitness, testimony memory began, psychologists had been studying memory, and the findings became useful for forensic psychology and law. A central issue with studying eyewitness memory and testimony is the ecological validity of lab studies. There are relatively few ‘real world’ eyewitness memory studies, and that causes problems for determining the generalizability of findings in eyewitness memory. Coined by Wells (1978) estimator variables are present at the time of a crime and cannot be changed (i.e. witness characteristics and the type of offence) and system variables are factors that can be manipulated to affect eyewitness accuracy (i.e. line-up procedures and interview types). The system variables

There are many factors to consider when psychologists and scientists are trying to figure out reliability of eyewitness testimony. The ability to recall or

An eyewitness can change the course of an investigation. However, how reliable that can be? People believe that we remember an event as exactly as it was, such as replaying the facts. Elizabeth Loftus is one of the leading researchers in the area of memory, and she found that memories are not accurately re-created. Reconstructing facts from our lives cannot be harmful, but it can be critical when deciding a criminal event. Loftus studies demonstrated that a simple wording question might change the eyewitness answer.

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.

Being wrongly convicted is a problem in the United States and its causes are two-fold. First, the criminal justice system in America has been flawed to believe eyewitness testimonies as a primary source of incarceration. Although research has shown that eyewitness identification is often unreliable, it is also some of the most convincing evidence that is presented to a judge or a jury. Christian A. Meissner from the University of Texas finds that this makes up 75 percent of post-conviction DNA exoneration cases in the U.S., making it the leading cause of these wrongful convictions. And even more so, at least 40 percent of these eyewitness identifications involved a cross racial identification. Meissner finds that people are less able to recognize faces of a different race than their own. The human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. In eyewitness identifications, witness memory is impacted by a variety of factors that occur from the time of the crime onwards, and their memories can be easily contaminated.

This study was in the cognitive approach to psychology, which focuses on the way people process information. It looks at how people process the information they receive and how the treatment of this information leads to their responses. The main area of cognitive psychology being studied is memory, which refers to processes and structures involved with storing and retrieving information. The theory of reconstructive memory and false memory is the focus of the experiment. False memory“is a mental experience that is mistakenly taken to be a veridical representation of an event from one's personal past” (Johnson, 2001). Factors which prompt the formations of false memory are misattribution of the original source of information.

An Article Review of “Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory” by Cochran et al. (2016)

Prior to the early 1970s the prominent idea of how memories were formed and retrieved revolved around the idea of processing memory into specific stores (Francis & Neath, 2014). These memory stores were identified as sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. In contrast to this idea, two researchers named Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed an idea linking the type of encoding to retrieval (Goldstein, 2015). This idea is known as the levels of processing theory. According to this theory, memory depends on the depth of processing that a given item is received by an individual (Goldstein, 2015). Craik and Lockhart stressed four points in supporting their theory. First, they argued that memory was the result of a series of analyses, each level of the series forming a deeper level of processing than the preceding level (Francis & Neath, 2014). The shallow levels of processing were believed to hold less importance and are defined as giving little attention to meaning of an item. Examples of which include focusing on how a word sounds or memorizing a phone number by repeating it over and over again (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The deeper levels processing involve paying close attention to the meaning of an item and relating that meaning to something else, an example of which would be focusing on the meaning of a word rather than just how the word sounds (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The second point Craik and Lockhart

Sensory registers relate to the memory formation in the following ways. By looking slowly around the room, each glance takes in an enormous amount of visual information, including colors, shapes, texture, relative brightness, and shadows. At the same time, you pick up sounds, smells, and other kinds of sensory data. All of this raw information flows from your senses into the sensory registers, which are like waiting rooms in which information enters and stays for only a short time. Whether we remember any of the information depends on which operations we perform on it (Morris & Maisto p. 192).

Memory is defined as "the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information." Our memory can be compared to a computer's information processing system. To remember an event we need to get information into our brain which is encoding, store the information and then be able to retrieve it. The three-stage processing model of Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin suggests that we record information that we want to remember first as a fleeting sensory memory and then it is processed into a short term memory bin where we encode it ( pay attention to encode important or novel stimuli) for long-term memory and later retrieval. The premise for the three step process is that we are unable to focus on too much

Conformity which is a behavior in accordance with socially accepted conventions or standards, is the finding of the study of social psychology linked to biology which are areas in which the Human Sciences have experimentally demonstrated that shared knowledge can shape personal knowledge. In order to first understand this relationship between shared knowledge and personal knowledge, one needs to understand how the human memory should not be trusted at a 100% as it is flawed because “juries tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable source of information” (Simply Psychology, 2009) says Saul McLeod. Loftus and Palmer conduct a study on eyewitness testimony to prove its unreliability and to prove their hypothesis that the terms used in eyewitness testimony can easily affect