Eyewitness Testimony Flashcards

Flashcards about eyewitness testimony

Eyewitness Testimony

An account given by people of an event they have witnessed.

Eyewitness Testimony Reliability

Juries tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable/persuasive source of information; however, research into this area has found that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable.

Factors impacting memory

Anxiety / Stress, Weapon Focus, Reconstructive Nature of Memory, Leading Questions

Anxiety/Stress on Memory

Can have 2 potential impacts: Some people actually recall information better when the event/memory was paired with increase stress/emotion. Others “blank” when too stressed or anxious

Weapon Focus

Refers to an eyewitness’s concentration on a weapon to the exclusion of other details of a crime; it is not unusual for a witness to be able to describe the weapon in much more detail than the person holding it.

Memory

The persistence of learning over time through the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information

Encode

Put new information in; extract meaning.

Store

Organize the information; retain over time.

Retrieve

Pull out the information when we want it

Reconstructive Memory

The process of remembering involving the recreation of an experience or event that has been only partially stored in memory.

Leading Questions

The way the question is phrased leads a person to fill in the blanks as to what happened; prompts or encourages a desired answer

Encoding Failure

Did not pay attention to the details that were eventually needed.

Rehearse

Once experienced, our memories of that experience will fade unless we have a reason to rehearse them.

Retrieve

Even if we have the information in our heads, sometimes it does not come back to us accurately.

Possible Encoding Failure Factors

Poor lighting, Distance in viewing, Short exposure, Something covering the perpetrator’s face (i.e., a mask), The “own-race bias” (the tendency for people to recognize faces of their own race more accurately than faces of other races)

Rehearsal failure factors

Something else happened immediately afterwards that redirected your attention, The emotional state of the witness put them into fight/flight or freeze mode, They had focused on elements not essential to the later questions

Retrieval failure factors

Leading questions influenced the memory, Prototype comparison errors: Misjudgements of size, consistency, degree., Errors of elaboration based on retelling.

Own- Race Bias

The tendency for people to recognize faces of their own race more accurately than faces of other races