Eyewitness Testimony Evaluation

We tend to mistake or confuse people in our daily lives, if one witnesses a crime are they most likely to remember what happened and recognize who did it? Memory can be easily deceived and we can create false memories. In psychology, there are numerous studies that focus on memory and on how accurately someone is able to recall a crime and the perpetrator. For instance, Elizabeth Loftus (1974) comes in mind when we talk about eyewitness testimonies and how the leading questions influence what we remember about an incident. Sometimes misinformation that is given to us can alter what we recall from the incident. In Loftus experiment she was able to predict that misinformation effect occurs when a witness is provided with inaccurate information

For their experiment, they tested out the idea that giving eyewitnesses confirming feedback would affect how accurate one is able to evaluate accurate or mistaken feedback based on the witness self-report questions and the evaluator’s testimony judgment questions, it was concluded that confirming feedback increased the perceived credibility of mistaken eyewitness more than increasing the perceived credibility of accurate eyewitnesses.

As study by Chan, Thomas, and Bulevich (2009) stated that our memory of an event can be altered when exposed to misinformation. Their research was conducted by adding misinformation when there was a no test and a test involved. However, one thing these studies have in common is how accurate one is able to recall the incident being shown and remember the details. Through their experiment the researchers learned that the participants learned misinformation better when they were tested, than when they were not being

They were tested verbally recalling a face and the participant’s ability to resist information about that face. They wanted to know if the participant’s memory were influenced by the information they heard. The results demonstrated that initial testing can reduce the influence of misinformation on subsequent recall of a perpetrators appearance. Our experiment was influenced on this seed article experiment; their experiment provided their participants with misinformation (misleading) or none (control). For our experiment we did not provide no post event information (control and misleading). Test vs. No Test changed to Cued recall vs. Free Recall. Misleading vs. Control changed to Nonviolent vs. Violent. Our hypothesis for the first IV is that the participants are more likely to remember a tragic event than a minor event. Suggesting that participants are more likely to recall a violent event rather than a nonviolent