Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Eyewitness Testimony (EWT)
- 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
- 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