Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness Testimony

1. Misleading Information

   • Loftus and Palmer looked into how misleading information could distort eyewitness testimony accounts.
     • Participants were shown slides of a car accident involving a number of cars and were asked to describe what happened. They were then asked questions that were specific. Eg 'About how fast were the cars going when they hit eachother?' They found that the estimated speed was affected by the verb used.
     • The researchlacks mundane realism. All the people used were students so not representative and therefore could be less experienced drivers and less able to estimate speed.
     • Easy to replicate as it was a lab experiment.

2. Anxiety

   • Recall is likely to be poor as we focus on what is making us anxious and exclude other information.
     • Clifford and Scott found that people who saw a film of a violent attack remembered fewer of the 40 pieces of information than a control group who saw a less stressful situation.
     • Yuille and Cutshall contradicts. 21 witnesses observed a shooting incident in Canada outside a gun shop in which 1 person was killed. Eyewitnesses were questioned then and 5 months after and asked to rate their stress levels when it happened. Results were that they gave highly accurate accounts and little changed after 5 months. High anxiety was linked to better accuracy.
       • High ecological validity
       • there was an extraneous variable. The witness who experienced the highest level of stress where closer to the event which could help recall.