AGE AND EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

AGE AND EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

1. Anastasi and Rhodes: 'own age bias'

   • Evaluation
     • Lacks ecological validity, would would not be asked to recall a number of people, in court also we don't know if a child witness would be this accurate in court
   • Procedure
     • LAB experiment
     • 3 age groups: 18-25, 35-45 and 55-78
       • Pps, were shown 24 photographs to rate on attractiveness, after a delay they were shown 48, 24 of which were distractions the rest were the photos they had seen previously.
         • Correct recognition showed that younger Pps were more accurate than older Pps
           • However, all age groups were more accurate on identifying photos from their own age group

2. Parker and Carranza: Experiment

   • Procedure
     • Showed college students and primary school kids slide sequence of mock crimes
       • They were then asked to identify a target individual
         • In the photo identification task child witnesses had a higher rate of choosing than adult witnesses, although they were more likely to make errors of identification than the college students
   • Evaluation

3. Yarmey: Field experiment

   • Procedure
     • Stopped 651 adults in public places and asked them to recall the physical characteristics of a young woman to whom they had spoken for 15 seconds just 2 minuets earlier.
       • although young (18-29) and middle-aged (30-44) adults were more confident in their recall than the older (45-65) adults, there were no significant differences in the accuracy of recall that could be attributed to the age group of witness
   • Evaluation

4. Memon et al: Immediate vs Delayed recall

   • Procedure
     • Studied the accuracy of young (16-33) and older (60-82) eyewitnesses.
     • found that when the delay between incident and identification was short (35 mins), there was no difference in the accuracy of the two age groups. However when the identification task was delayed by 1 week, the older witnesses were significantly less accurate

5. Brigham and Malpass: Differential Experience Hypothesis

   • Suggests that the more contact we have with members of a particular age group, the better out memory would be for such individuals, consequently the less experience we have with a particular age group the greater the own age bias
     • i.e. A-level teachers would be better at recalling student A-level age (16-18) than someone who works with older adults