Eyewitness Testimony (EWT)

3 Stages
1. Encodes into LTM details of event
2. Witness retains information for a period of time. Memories may be lost or modified
3. Witness retrieves memory from storage
Accuracy
1. Loftus and Palmer (1974)
  1. To see if leading questions affected accuracy
  2. Estimated speed was correlational to the severity of the adjective
  3. 'Critical question'
Factors that influence accuracy
1. Anxiety
  1. Weapon focus
    1. Arousal may focus the witness on more central details than peripheral details
    2. Loftus et al (1987)
      1. Suggested that the weapon distracted attention from the person holding it
      2. Explains why some EWT have poor recall for violent crimes
  2. High and low levels of anxiety impact EWT badly
  3. Curvilinear relationship
  4. Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908)
2. Age of witness
  1. Age differences
    1. Parker and Carranza (1989)
      1. Compared primary students and college students
      2. Task was to identify target in a mock crime
      3. Kids had higher rate of choosing, but were more likely to make errors
    2. Yarmey (1993)
      1. Stopped 651 adults and asked them to recall a young women
      2. Found no significant difference between age
    3. Memon et al (2003)
      1. Studied accuracy between 16-33 and 60-82
      2. When the delay was short (35mins) there was no difference
      3. When the delay was longer (2weeks) the older witnesses were much less accurate
  2. Own age bias
    1. Superior memory for faces within age group
    2. Anastasi and Rhodes (2006) used 3 age groups (18-25, 35-45, 55-78)
    3. All age groups were most accurate with identifying their own
    4. Shown photographs that'd fit within each age group

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Eyewitness Testimony (EWT)

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	Created by kati.lombardi over 10 years ago