ASSIGNMENT

Topic:
Discuss relation of eye witness testimony to various forms of memory retreival
across memory systems.

Eye Witness Testimony

Eyewitness testimony is what happens when a person witnesses a (crime
accident, or other legally important event) and later gets up on the stand and
recalls for the court all the details of the witnessed event. It involves a more
complicated process than might initially be presumed.
For Example
An eyewitness is a person who was present at an event and can therefore
describe it, for example in a law court. Eyewitnesses say the police then opened
fire on the crowd.
RELATION OF EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY TO VATIOUS FORMS OF MEMORY
RETRIEVAL
BARTLETT’S STORY RECALL EXPERIMENT:
Reconstructive memory suggests that in the absence of all information, we fill in
the gaps to make more sense of what happened. According to Bartlett, we do this
using schemas. These are our previous knowledge and experience of a situation
and we use this process to complete the memory. This means that our memories
are a combination of Specific traces encoded at the time of the event, along with
our knowledge, expectations, beliefs and experiences of such an event.
Bartlett used a Chinese Whispers technique where English people read an Indian
folk story called ‘War of the Ghosts’. This story was unfamiliar to the people and
from a different culture, so it did not fit in with their schemas. When it came to
recalling the story, as time went on the became shorter and shorter, and the
accounts were distorted in a number of ways. He found people left out bits of the
story that they did not understand and changed information and rationalized it
using their own culture. This shows that people do reconstruct memories.
Types of Memory Distortions:
There are three types of memory
Source Amnesia:
This type of amnesia is associated with an inability to remember where
knowledge was learned.
Effect:
This occurs when a person remembers an event (an episodic memory recall), and
now they do not remember the event correctly.
Choice Supportive Bias:
This memory distortion means that one views something as more favorable due
to bias, whether or not it is more favorable.
Cognitive Dissonance:
This type of memory distortion occurs when a person holds conflicting beliefs.
There is often discomfort when a person holds two belief’s that are contradictory
to one another.
Eye Witness Example
For Example
There is a boy who is witnesses of a real life incident (a gun shooting outside a
gun shop in some Street) had remarkable accurate memories of a stressful event
involving weapons. A thief stole guns and money.
The police interviewed witnesses, and thirteen of them were re-interviewed five
months later. Recall was found to be accurate, even after a long time, and two
misleading questions inserted by the research team had no effect on recall
accuracy. One weakness of this case the researchers found was that the
witnesses who experienced the highest levels of stress where actually closer to
the event, and this may have helped with the accuracy of their memory recall.
Cognitive Interview
The cognitive interview (CI) is a questioning technique used by the police to
enhance retrieval of information about a crime scene from the eyewitnesses and
victim’s memory.
Geisel man et al. (1985) developed the Cognitive Interview (CI) as an alternative
to the Standard Interview. It takes into account psychological findings about cue-
dependent forgetting and has four stages designed to stimulate as many cues as
possible in order to maximize different retrieval routes.:
Stage 1: Reinstate the context
Stage 2: Recall events in reverse order
Stage 3: Report everything they can remember
Stage 4: Describe events from someone else’s point of view.
Because our memories are made up of a network of associations rather than
discrete and unconnected events, there are a number of ways that these
memories can be accessed. The cognitive interview exploits this by using multiple
retrieval strategies.