EWT

EWT

1. Misleading Information

   • Key study
     • Did you see the barn
       • Loftus showed 150 participants a film of a car crash. The participants where divied into two groups and where asked ten questions about the film. the first group where asked questions that where consistent with the film they seen the second group were given the same questions with the exception of one "How fast was the car going then it passed the barn on the country lane. The question was misleading, there was no country lane. After one week the participants where given another ten questions the last one was "did you see the barn" only 2.7%of the first group gave the wrong answer. 17.3% from the second group answered incorrectly also.
         • Loftus concluded that for these people the nonexistent barn had been added to the original memory at the question stage & was recalled as part of the original event
           • Evaluation
             • However, although this shows that some witnesses can be mislea, it is important to reilise that 80% of participants in the mislead group gave correct responses
             • However, a weakness is that there is contradictory evidence that misleading information is a factor which affects the accuracy of EWT. this is known as the Red purse study. It shows that if infomation which is obvious and central is less subject to distortion , therefore misleading info does not always result in poor EWT

2. Leading questions

   • Key study
     • Speed of the car/word difference
       • Loftus & Palmer (1974) showed participants a film of a car accident and afterwards asked them a crucial question ‘what speed were the vehicles travelling when they hit? The word hit was replaced with different words for different groups. They found that what word was used affected the estimates of speed that participants gave.Contacted 32 mph Hit 34 mph Bumped 38 mph Collided 39 mph Smashed 41 mph A week later when participants were asked whether they had seen any broken glass, those in the smashed group were consistently more likely to answer YES wrongly.
         •  A strength is that there is supporting evidence that leading questions affect the accuracy of EWT Loftus et al (1978) showed participants a film of a car accident. They were asked either ‘did you see a broken headlight?’ or ‘did you see the broken headlight?’ There was no broken headlight. Participants given the ‘the’ question were twice as likely to report they had.

3. Post-Event Discussion

   • film watched from different perspectives
     • Gabbert et al. (2003) investigated memory conformity effects between individuals who witness and then discuss a criminal event Participants were 60 students and 60 older adults They watched a short film of a girl entering an unoccupied university office to return a borrowed book. Participants were in pairs, each partner watched a different video of the same scenario. Both clips contained exactly the same sequence of events, the only difference was that they were filmed from different angles so as to simulate different witness perspectives.
       • Condition 1: Pairs in the experimental condition were encouraged to discuss the event Condition 2: Pairs in the control condition were not allowed to discuss the event After this participants engaged in a series of unrelated filler tasks for 45 minutes. The recall test was then administered in the form of a questionnaire. All participants completed the questionnaire individually.
         • Findings- Combining data from both younger and older adults, a very high number of witnesses (71%) who had discussed the event went on to mistakenly recall items acquired during the discussion. There were no age-related differences in susceptibility. It was concluded that the memory conformity in condition 1 could be the result of the social process of informational social influence (conform due to a desire to be accurate).

4. The affect of anxiety on EWT

   • Yerkes- dodson law
     • An increase in arousal(anxiety) improves performance but only up to a point
   • Loftus (1979) asked participants to wait in a room when they arrived for the experiment. During this wait participants overheard either:  A low-key discussion in a lab about equipment failure. A person then emerged from the lab holding a pen with grease on his hands and left the room  A heated & hostile exchange from the lab. After the sound of breaking glass & crashing chairs, a man emerged from the lab holding a paper knife covered in blood and left the room. Participants were then given 50 photos & asked to identify the man. Participants in the pen group were 49% accurate but the knife group was only 33% accurate.
     •  Supporting evidence for the role of anxiety - the violence of an event can be a cause of anxiety. Loftus and Bums (1982) made participants in their study watch a film of a crime. Some participants however saw a version with an extremely violent scene (a young boy being shot in the face). When questioned about the events in the film, those participants who saw the non-violent version of the film recalled much more detail of the crime than those who witnessed the more violent crime. It seems that the shock of the event disrupted storage of other details, both before and after the actual violent scene.
     •  However, contradictory evidence for the role of anxiety comes from the Yuille and Cutshall study below which suggests that anxiety can have a positive effect on EWT

5. Weapon focus

   • This is the tendency for witnesses of violent crimes to focus their attention on the weapon used. this leads to poor quality testimony