Memory And Memory: A Case Study

Case Study Brian is a thirty year old male who had witnessed an armed robbery on his trip to the grocery store. He was able to give the police a description of the suspect and had identified a man the police picked up as the perpetrator. Later, police found the suspect to be innocent despite Brian’s confidence in his identifying of the man. Brian was confused about the incident and decided to come talk to me about his concerns. He wanted to understand what attention, perception and memory were and how attention and perception could have influenced his memory. I explained to him that, according to Matlin (2012), attention is “a concentration of mental activity that allows you to take in a limited portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and your memory”. In simpler terms attention is the ability to selectively process …show more content…
These factors can influence your eyewitness testimony and cause the accuracy in your recall of the event do be substantially lower than in a less stressful situation (Matlin, 2012). Our memory is not set in stone as you may believe. It is subject to personal interpretation which has weighing effects on the accuracy of your memory of the incident as well. You take information which you have already stored and use it to interpret the memories you have (McLeod, 2009). The race of the man you described also has an effect. You are more attuned the features associated with your own race which is a normal occurrence and often referred to as own-ethnicity bias (Matlin, 2012). Because of this affect you are much less likely able to recognize a face of someone of a different race. As you can see there are many factors that can influence eyewitness testimony, even the way in which the questioning from the officers is phrased can produce different recall (Engelhardt, Fisher & Tversky,