Eye witness testimony

Eye witness testimony

1. Accuracy of EWT

   • Experience of being a EW
     • Stress/anxiety
       • Yerkes Dodson Curve
       • Clifford & Scott ,1978
         • Those who saw a violent attack remembered less
       • Deffenbacher, 1983
         • excessive stress (arousal) led to > accuracy
       • Yuille & Cutshall,1986
         • > levels of stress , didn't reduce accuracy
         • EW resist leading Qs
     • Weapon focus/Attention, percpetion
       • Maass & Kohnken,1989
         • injection affected memory of experimenter
       • Johnson & Scott ,1976 orginal
     • Reconstructive memory
       • WOG
       • affected by perception , beliefs, imagination
       • Loftus

2. Memory

   • Altered between storage & retrieval
     • Misinformation
       • Intervention; passage of time;age
       • Loftus et al., 1974
         • Certain words after seeing a car crash effect the percieved speed (smash+; contact-)
           • Didn't lead to a false memory , the perception changed
       • War of Ghosts ; Bartlett 1932
         • a native american story of ghost
           • Retold this , varied depending on culture , created new info with longer duration and more times told
             • Prejudice, unconcious bias, perception
     • Ost et al., 2008
       • London Bombing 2005
         • video didnt exist of bus being blown up
           • 28% said yes
       • Crommbag , 1995 ; air crash
   • Memory is the process of maintaining information over time (Matlin 2005)

3. Flashbulb memories

   • emotional significant memories of events , clear vivid image ie. 9/11 people in downtown NY better memory than those in suburbs , queen elizabeth death