Eyewitness Testimony

One common cognitive process is memory. However, how reliable is memory specifically eye witness testimonies? Eye witness testimony has been the bases of many research studies, an eye witness is someone who give their account of an event that they has witnessed. Eye witness testimonies are widely used in court as a means of evidence, making it crucial that the witness has a reliable memory. Eye witness testimonies use to be a very damning piece of evidence. As time went on and as more research went in to looking at the reliability of memory an eye witness testimony has lost a great deal of weight in courts. DNA is now what trumps anything that an eye witness has to say due to the fact that memory can be distorted or reconstructed. Reconstructive memory refers to the way the brain takes in information and makes sense of the surroundings. This essay will …show more content…
A leading researcher in memory is a woman named Elizabeth Loftus, much of her research support Bartlett’s theory that memory is reconstructive. Understanding the reconstructive nature of memory is vital when analyzing how reliable the memory of an eye witness is. Factors such as schemas can have a vast effect on an individual’s memory due to the fact schemas are used to organize and in some cases change memory to make their surroundings more understandable. Schemas can be influenced by culture and surrounding thus exemplifying just how memory can be unreliable. Studies conducted by Loftus showing that memory is reconstructive is why Loftus has made it evident in the physiological community the concern of over using eye witnesses in courts. Many people believe that memory is played back in a fashion similar to a film where most details are presented in a manner very similar to how the situation happened. It is apparent however memory is not like this, instead the encoding process only uses what is found to be