Eyewitness Testimony (EWT)

Eyewitness Testimony (EWT)

1. 3 Stages

   • Encodes into LTM details of event
   • Witness retains information for a period of time. Memories may be lost or modified
   • Witness retrieves memory from storage

2. Accuracy

   • Loftus and Palmer (1974)
     • To see if leading questions affected accuracy
     • Estimated speed was correlational to the severity of the adjective
     • 'Critical question'

3. Factors that influence accuracy

   • Anxiety
     • Weapon focus
       • Arousal may focus the witness on more central details than peripheral details
       • Loftus et al (1987)
         • Suggested that the weapon distracted attention from the person holding it
         • Explains why some EWT have poor recall for violent crimes
     • High and low levels of anxiety impact EWT badly
     • Curvilinear relationship
     • Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908)
   • Age of witness
     • Age differences
       • Parker and Carranza (1989)
         • Compared primary students and college students
         • Task was to identify target in a mock crime
         • Kids had higher rate of choosing, but were more likely to make errors
       • Yarmey (1993)
         • Stopped 651 adults and asked them to recall a young women
         • Found no significant difference between age
       • Memon et al (2003)
         • Studied accuracy between 16-33 and 60-82
         • When the delay was short (35mins) there was no difference
         • When the delay was longer (2weeks) the older witnesses were much less accurate
     • Own age bias
       • Superior memory for faces within age group
       • Anastasi and Rhodes (2006) used 3 age groups (18-25, 35-45, 55-78)
       • All age groups were most accurate with identifying their own
       • Shown photographs that'd fit within each age group

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