EWT- Memory

EWT- Memory

1. Factors affecting recall

   • Schemas
   • Misleading info
   • Age
   • anxiety

2. Misleading Info

   • Info that suggests a desired answer
   • Loftus
     • asked participants to estimate the speed of cars in films concerning traffic accidents
     • Estimated speed was affected by participants being given verbs to choose from, eg. smashed, collided or contacted
     • Leading questions affected schemas influencing them to give a desired answer
     • Participants also remembered the sighting of broken glass when the word smashed was chosen
     • Highest estimate=smash=40.8mph
     • 45 American students
     • Lab
     • lowest estimate=31.8mph

3. Anxiety

   • Unpleasant state of emotional arousal
   • Can divert attention away from the situation
   • Moderate arousal gives optimum performance
   • Yuille and cutshall= positive
     • Witnesses of a real life shooting in canada
     • Remarkable accurate memories of a stressful event involving weapons.
     • Police gave interviews and there was accurate responses given 5 months later
     • Aids LT recall
   • Deffenbacher
     • reviewed 21 studies
     • stress was positively linked to performance
   • Clifford
     • people who saw a violent film remembered fewer than 40 items compared to the control group who saw a less violent film
     • Memory is affected in real life situations

4. Age

   • cognitive abilities diminish with age
   • children appear more prone to accepting misleading info
   • dependant on how they were questioned
   • Older have less detailed recall
   • Roberts and Lamb Negative
     • 68/161 interviews with children with allegations of abuse
     • Investigators misinterpreted or distorted childrens reports
     • 2/3 of these went uncorrected
     • Young children accept false information for fear of contradicting authority/adult figures
   • Ochsner positive
     • children who watched a staged theft remembered more details that those who saw the same event without the theft.
     • memory was more serious so is more likely to be remembered
   • Loftus
     • found that the elderly are more likely to make false identifications and were poor at recalling specific details
     • prone to misleading info
     • accuracy declines with age

5. Improving EWT

   • Cognitive interview- geiselman
   • Change in narrative order-recount the scene in different chronological orders
   • Change in perspective-recount the scene from different perspectives
   • Mental reinstatement of context- return to environmental and emotional context
   • Report everything- even of little importance