Essay on Eyewitness Error

Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder, we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully, or it can be contaminated. A case I would like to mention is the Calvin Willis Case. One night in 1982, three young girls were sleeping alone in a Shreveport, Louisiana home when a man in cowboy boots came into the house and raped the oldest girl, who was Ten years old. When police started to investigate the rape, the three girls all remembered the attack differently. One police report said the Ten year old victim didn’t see her attacker’s face. Another report which wasn’t introduced at trial said she identified Calvin Willis, who lived in the neighbourhood. The girl’s mother testified at trial that neighbours had mentioned Willis’s name when discussing who might have committed the crime. The victim testified that she was shown photos and told to pick the man without a full beard. She testified that she didn’t pick anyone, police said she picked Willis. Willis was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. In 2003, DNA testing proved Willis’ innocence and he was released. He had served nearly Twenty Two years in prison for a crime he didn’t

From my point of view, one of the lessons that I have learnt from the various examples of false memory cases is that implanting false memories may lead to a tragic legacy that such accusations can leave behind. As example, from the Gary Ramona case, he was being accused for repeatedly raped his own daughter, Holly for over a lengthy period but in fact, it is actually Holly’s psychotherapist, Marche Isabella whom implanted

Factors such as misinformation and eyewitness talk can easily affect the memory of eyewitnesses and therefore affect their testimony_. Evidence which is usually provided during eyewitness memory reports helps to determine the guilt or innocence of a perpetrator in a criminal proceeding_. With the help of many basic psychological and neuroscience studies, it has been indicated that because memory is a reconstructive process it is likely to be influenced and vulnerable to change and misinformation_. Due to memory being vulnerable, any minor memory misrepresentation can have severe consequences when used in the courtroom_. Memory errors when regarding the identification of a perpetrator of a specific crime has been focused on during research

The Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony Part 1 - How reliable is Eyewitness testimony? The Reconstructive nature of memory - Schemas and Stereotypes The reconstructive nature of memory is related to the schema theory. A schema is a package of memory that is organized and developed throughout our lives.

When crimes occur, the courts rely on certain star witnesses who were present and able to remember key details that can either lock up the defendant or prove them innocent. When we really think about how crucial these testimonies are, it’s only fair to question how reliable these memories are and if they should be admissible in court when it comes to a ones’ life. In psychology, this is referred to as false memory. False memory is the recollection of past events that have not occurred. In addition to eyewitness testimonies, this also occurs among victims of sexually abuse.

There are many reasons on why eyewitness accounts may be inaccurate. The main reasons I believe is because of reconstructing memories, familiarity effect, source amnesia and weapon focus . Reconstructing memory is when the original memories can be altered. By any little thing can change one’s memory into believing something that is false about the original memory. We may add or omit details based on an influences. For example in the study of Elizabeth F. Loftus asked two different groups to watch a car accident but groups were asked a how fast the cars were going in a different way. The question was “how fast did the cars hit/smashed into each other” , the group that was told the word smashed believed the cars went fast. Later, the eyewitness for that group clam to see broken glass at the scene but there wasn’t any. Influences can change or exaggerate certain aspects of the event. Witness will believe someone committed a crime due to familiarity effect. They may think they seen that person before so therefore they believe that the person who did. Source amnesia is when the eyewitness knew the crime happen but can’t remember when, how or when. In court that would not help at all. Weapon focus play a part in it too because if the time of the scene the eyewitness could have been

* Hindsight Bias: Hindsight bias can affect the eyewitness in that, once the witness learns how the event turned out, it can affect how they remember the crime.

Crime investigation procedures rely on the recollection of eyewitness. However, the reliability of eyewitness can be influenced by emotion. Marsh, Tversky and Huutson (2005) investigated on the different mechanism that could influence the eyewitness accounts, which is the consequences of the way which eyewitnesses describe the crime when retelling it to others. This post-encoding effect had no specific errors suggested to witnesses but leads to a misinformation effect. Seventy-five participants were arranged into conditions with between-subjects factor of Factual focus, Affective focus and No-talk after watching movies with three levels of disturbing content.

Memory has been a subject of study to see if what we remember is a true memory or a false memory. Some of the studies conducted on this have used sentences, prose, films and slides to test the memory and find out if the individual can recall the actual story or have false memories about what they experienced (Roediger III & McDermott, 1995, p. 803). The problem arises when eyewitnesses recall information about an event but proves to be false. Roediger, Jacoby and McDermott state that when you test the memory you are not just testing the retention of that event, you are also changing how the individual retains that particular event in the future.

Experiment 1 results found that many of the students failed to remember the initial data provided to them at the onset of the study, which provided the effect of misinformation on the memory of the participant: “These analyses revealed a significant main effect for misinformation items, F(1, 163) = 9.89, p = .002, ηp2 = .06, 90 % CI for effect size = [.01, .12] (Cochran et al, 2016, p.721). This data confirms that the students had not retained the original memory of the crimes committed, which resulted in a large-scale choice blindness. In this manner, the multiple –choice segment of this study exposed memory lapses as part of the re-evaluation process of the participant 's memories. Therefore, misinformation was not properly identified in the remembrance of these criminal scenarios.

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

This study examined age differences in eyewitness testimony. Children, three and six years of age, and adults interacted with an unfamiliar man for 5 minutes. Four or five days later, the witnesses answered objective and suggestive questions, recalled what happened, and tried to identify the confederate from a target-present photo line-up. The adults and 6-year-olds did not differ in their ability to answer objective questions or identify the confederate, but 6-year-olds were more suggestible than adults and recalled less about the event. Compared to the older age groups, the 3-year-olds answered fewer

False memories have been the subject of many studies since Deese (1959) investigated their effects.

Memory facilitates necessary functions in daily life activities, but it is not a perfect mechanism in operation. Goldstein (2011) states that memory is, “…the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present” (p.116). There are many adaptive functions within the complexities of the human memory system and the interlinked constructs between each function leave room for doubt in the accuracy of recollection. Study of the human mind has opened avenues of discovery on the inner workings of our brains and the resulting knowledge suggests that humans are prone to creating false memories and even remembering things that never actually happened. A great deal of information has been written explaining the nature of memory errors and within the following pages a real-life case offers a glimpse into how recall distortions and memory errors can wield unpleasant consequences. Memory errors can be avoided with a significant effort, but the truth remains that no one is perfect and memories are subject to individual bias.

Can we trust our memories? People rely on memories to make judgments on everything from voting for political candidates to deciding what to eat at a restaurant. However, memory is not always reliable. Previous research has established that memory is vulnerable and susceptible to confabulations under specific circumstances (1, 3, 9, 11, 12, 13). Misremembering information or an event can influence subsequent decisions, sometimes with drastic consequences. In order to prevent these adverse consequences, we must begin by understanding the mechanisms involved in producing false memories.