Eyewitness Testimony (EWT) - created from Mind Map

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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

Accuracy

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

To see if leading questions affected accuracy

Estimated speed was correlational to the severity of the adjective

'Critical question'

Factors that influence accuracy

Anxiety

Age of witness

Weapon focus

High and low levels of anxiety impact EWT badly

Curvilinear relationship

Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908)

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

Age differences

Own age bias

Parker and Carranza (1989)

Yarmey (1993)

Memon et al (2003)

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

Stopped 651 adults and asked them to recall a young women

Found no significant difference between age

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

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

Eyewitness Testimony (EWT)