Eyewitness identification

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…

Memory plays significant role in eyewitness identification by retrieving the correct information, its performance should be sound, reliable and accurate for eyewitness line-up identification . There is a big difference between reliable memory and unreliable memory. Reliable memory however, is the consistency and justice, thus; accuracy in recalling coding/ decoding the right event from the past, and accurately identifying the right suspect as he / she ’s the right offender with…

To what extent can we rely on sense perception and memory as ways of knowing? My short-term memory has never been something to be praised, I was asked what I had for lunch three days ago, I sat there momentarily thinking about the lunches that I had over the previous days, after a little while I told the person that asked me that I could not answer. I have always had greater confidence in my long-term memory, I generally find it to be more accurate and easier to recall than more recent memories…

After watching How reliable is your memory? by Elizabeth Loftus, I believe that to a great extent, memory is not a reliable source of knowledge because it can be distorted, contaminated, and even falsely imagined. Memory decay, distorted memory, hindsight bias, consistency bias, the availability heuristic bias and suggestibility- are all problems that beset our reliance on memory.“I was there. I saw it.” The phrase that many witnesses confidently use in courts of law- to generally support or…

To begin, Gomberg argues that a normal human life and reliable knowledge of the world around us requires us to have two virtues: we must trust what others tell us; we must be modest about what we believe ourselves to know when we recognize we may be wrong. Either we trust what someone is saying, or we deny it and doubt it. In today’s world, most people find it very hard to believe what another person is saying. They’ve came to know their own beliefs and what they believe to be true or not. A lot…

The accuracy of an eyewitness is the essential part for the jurors’ decision making regarding a particular case. The jurors depends on the eyewitness for an accurate statement of the testimony that is being presented. There are many wrong convictions throughout the legal systems and many factors that comes into play, but the eyewitness has the highest percentage for wrong misidentification. Therefore, research has been done to help improved the accuracy of the witness testimony. The three best…

relationship between IB, attentional set, information type and expectancy conditions by having participants complete tasks whilst viewing an audio-visual of a food court. Through their laboratory study, Rivardo et al. (2011) could accurately examine eyewitness retention through the varying conditions and conclude under what task conditions participants became more likely to experience IB; therefore, giving inaccurate and misinformed reports of the staged crime. Whilst thorough, the study only…

Smalarz and Gary L. Wells conducted a study, Post-Identification Feedback to Eyewitnesses Impairs Evaluators’ Abilities to Discriminate between Accurate and Mistaken Testimony. The main research question in this study was whether feedback interferes with evaluators’ abilities to discriminate between accurate and mistaken identification testimony. This study is interesting because many people have been wrongfully convicted because of mistaken eyewitness testimonies. This study tackles the…

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…

absolute and relative judgments in eyewitness identification." Law and Human Behavior 35 (5): 364-380. Accessed September 14, 2016. doi: 10.1007/s10979-010-9245-1. This peer-viewed report, published in the Law and Human Behavior journal, the official journal for the American Psychology-Law Society compares the two decision-making models of judgement, relative and absolute using the WITNESS model (a computerised memory and decision-making model that produces eyewitness response probabilities) in…