Age and Eyewitness testimony

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Age and Eyewitness Testimony

AGE AFFECTS EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

AGE DOES NOT AFFECT EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

Parker and Carranza

lab experiment

compared primary school children and college students

correctly identify a target individual following a slide of a mock crime

Children less accurate than adults

EVALUATION

easily replicated

test-retest reliability

no ethical concerns because the study was a false one so no one was really harmed and therefore no lasting damage to people

not generalisable

not representative

not ecologically valid

Yarmey

stopped adults in public place and sked them to recall physical characteristics of a women they had just spoke to minutes ago for 15 seconds

no difference in accurate recall between age groups

EVALUATION

representative

generalisable

ecologically valid

difficult to replicate as there are many extraneous variables

Memon et al

studied two groups:16-33 and 60-82 years

when delay was short between incident and recall NO DIFFERENCE

when delay was a week (longer) older participants significantly less accurate

EVALUATION

generalisable

representative

replicable

not ecologically valid

no ethical concerns

Anastasia

Age own bias

people more accurate when remembering features of those similar to there selves

e.g. age, race, ethnicity, background etc

Age and Eyewitness testimony