. Make sure to give a thorough reply that builds on the previous post, expanding the subject and commenting on the previous post. When replying to post, avoid using words such as "I enjoyed reading..." or "That sounded like fun..." Please make an effort to reply to as many different students as possible throughout the duration of the class.…
Autobiographical memory, sometimes termed personal memory, is a combination of episodes recollected from an individual's life. When considered collectively, autobiographical memories serve as the basis for a person's life story. These memories help form a person's sense of identity and self-image. Autobiographical memory is quite distinct from the memorizing of words, pictures and lists that have traditionally been studied in laboratory settings.…
AFRICAN AMERICANS WRONGLY CONVICTED 3 Why Are African Americans More Likely to Be Wrongly Convicted in the United States? Introduction Imagine, you are just minding your business walking down a street and an officer stop you to bring you to the station to question you. The next thing you know you are being charged for a crime you didn’t commit.…
There have been many wrongful convictions due to faulty memories. However, these eyewitnesses believe that their memory is true, even if some of it is false. These memories could be wrong for a number of reasons: information from other places, combining some of the gathered information with…
Suggestive Eyewitness Identification Procedures The purpose of the article by Zimmerman, Austin and Kovera(2012) was review previous research into suggestive eyewitness identification procedures, including the methodology of the research conducted and to investigate the future implications of this and what research still needs to be done in the field. This important because eyewitness identification by way of lineups is a key method used in the criminal justice system to identify perpetrator and there it is important how to ensure optimal accuracy and minimum suggestibility. The process of conducting lineups has been likened to an experiment and similar to an experiment biases can be created during the lineup procedure.…
A major role in criminal justice system with many crimes are eyewitnesses, they are vital in identifying, charging and convicting perpetrators of crimes. There are numerous issues concerning child eyewitnesses in the criminal justice system, such as accuracy and reliability. A number of researchers have theorised that children assume that adults would not request a child to identify a target if they were not in the line-up. Children feel pressured to identify regardless of whether it was a correct identification. Mistaken identification made by child witnesses has a higher rate than with those that are adult witnesses, this is predictable with past research demonstrating that children ‘make more choices and prone to guessing’…
The results conclude that due to the suggestive language and close ended question, there may have been a negative impact on the accuracy of the information the child provides (Cederborg et al., 2000). Suggesting the child is dumb for not being able to recall an event that occurred previously, could alter what the child says, he or she…
The constructive nature of memory is one of the reasons for the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies. The human brain does not record all the things that people see around them. Instead, the brain collects different pieces of information that are relevant to the situation. Consequently, eyewitness accounts may be flawed because as the brain attempts to reconstruct different bits of information, it might omit vital details (OpenStax College, 2016). The scenario is better understood when comparing human recollection to playing a video recording.…
The testimonies gained from witnesses are considered a vital component when conducting a criminal investigation. The two imperative duties an eyewitness will be called upon is either to recollect details of an event (recall), or to identify the face of a person seen earlier (recognition). On the contrary, eyewitness memory is notoriously malleable where previous studies have demonstrated memory can be manipulated in several…
In order to report accurate eyewitness testimonies, a person should have better memory for autobiographical events. One way to help this development in children, which improves with age, include that parents encourage their children to share their experiences, to ask questions, and to help them with facts about shared events. In the case of preschoolers, they are often considered as nonstrategic when it comes to memory efforts. Also, selective attention is a very important component that can aid memory of an event. For preschoolers, selective attention to one thing and not to another is very difficult to achieve because this is not a skill usually used by 3- or 4-year-olds (Broderick & Blewitt, 2015).…
Two major issues in long-term memory for children are increased suggestibility and errors in source monitoring. This means that they can take false information into their brain and keep that as an actual memory and they can have problems remembering the source of where they learned a piece of information. More and more studies have been conducted investigating the validity of children’s eyewitness testimony and strategies for improving their accuracy. Several studies have been conducted on the long-term memory effects of eye closure on children’s eyewitness testimony. Children can be informative witnesses, but the quality of information they provide is influenced by factors such as the kind of retrieval mechanisms engaged and the quality of communication between the child witness and the adult interviewer.…
Maturation refers to the gradual progression of development over time. As I grew older my brain began to develop and the neurons began to mature. The result was an increase in the number of synapses made, 15,000 per neuron, although many that were unused were eliminated through synaptic pruning, a process which is a completely normal step in development. Through the increase in synapses, a complex network of neural pathways was developed, allowing for the sending of messages with the help of neurotransmitters. My brain was able to modify these connections because of its plasticity, which is why new information was able to be learned, enabling development from infancy to adulthood.…
One of the earliest and potentially the first experiment to test this was conducted by Sheingold and Tenney (1982) in which they had asked university students a series of questions about the birth of a sibling (Gross, Jack, Davis, & Hayne, 2013 Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand). Students reported almost no memory of their sibling’s birth; however, students that were 4 and over were able to recall the birth of the sibling and with a substantial amount of information (Gross, et al., 2013). Sheingold and Tenney (1982) concluded that childhood amnesia ended by the ages of 3 and 4 years of age. Unfortunately, the approach of using a target-event method resulted in its disadvantages, one of which comes from the universal questions that are commonly asked request details that participants may have been unlikely to take note of in the first place (e.g. “What time of day was it when they [your mother and the baby] came home?”) (Gross, et al., 2013).…
One cognitive process that questions the reliability of the minds cognitive processes is memory. Memory is a very significant part of eye-witness testimony (EWT) which is a statement given by people that were either involved in an event or witnessed the event. EWT is vital in the criminal justice system as a way of testifying in criminal trials and relies solely on the accuracy of the person’s memory. Therefore, it is a very important that the testimony is reliable as it often has the power to determine one’s future. Before recent studies, EWT was seen as being a very trustworthy way of testifying, however, newer research has now shown that memory may not be as reliable as we thought and is subjected to being distorted which effects the reliability…
Memories were divided into five different categories: (1) recognition or recall of a specific event that occurred, (2) recall of a specific location of an object, (3) a cue which triggered the child’s memory, (4) novel memories that the child specifically did, or (5) recurrent memories. These recordings showed us that forty percent of all the memories recalled were from the first category, an aspect from an event, with over seventy percent of these children being older than twenty-four months. Young children, however, seem to remember things that have to do with objects and their surroundings. Age does seem to be a factor here. Forty percent of memories recalled occurred between one and three…