What are four possible factors that make eyewitness unreliable?
- Anxiety and stress during the incident
- Presence of a weapon
- Suggestive questions
- Misinformation effect
What are the five stages of memory
- Perception/ Attention
- Encoding
- Short term memory
- Long term memory
- Retrieval
What are the two types of eyewitness testimony memory
- Recall memory
2. Recognition memory
What are the independent variables with regards to eyewitness of a crime
Estimator and system variables
What are three general dependent variables in eyewitness testimony
Recall of the event
Recall of the target/ culprit
Recognition of the target/culprit
What are some negative implications of relying upon an eyewitness to solve the crime
- Insufficient memory can result in case never being solved
2. Inaccurate info can lead to innocent people being convicted
What were four things police did wrong in interviewing a witness
- They would interrupt the witness
- The would use short specific answers
- They would ask for info irrelevant to what witness was trying to recall
- Tended to ask suggestive questions
Define the misinformation effect
Phenomenon where a witness who is presented with inaccurate info after an event will incorporate that misinformation in a subsequent recall task
What are three explanations for the misinformation effect?>
- Misinformation acceptance hypothesis
- Source misattribution hypothesis
- Memory impairment hypothesis
Define the Misinformation acceptance hypothesis
Incorrect info is provided because the witness takes a guess at what the officer wants to hear
Define the Source Misattribution hypothesis
Both the original memory and the misinfo memory are stored, but the witness cant remember where either originated from
Define the Memory impairment hypothesis
The original memory is deleted and replaced with misinfo memory
What are two ways to interview an eyewitness when nothing else works?
Hypnotically refreshed memory and cognitive interview
what are four factors that can influence the likelihood of hypnosis working?
- The degree of trust the witness has in hypnotist
- Willingness to be hypnotized
- Witness’s belief in hypnosis
- Seriousness of the context for being hypnotized
Define the cognitive interview
- Has been developed based on memory storage and retrieval principles, much more accurate than hypnosis
- Has been shown to increase the amount of accurate info by 30%
What was the original method of the cognitive interview?
- Reinstate the context
- Report everything
- Reverse the order of events
- Change perspective
What are the steps of the enhanced method of the cognitive interview?
- Rapport building to make witness comfortable
- Supportive interview behaviour
- Transfer of control to the eyewitness
- Focused retrieval
