Dean Sanders – 2/10/2010

Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness Testimony (EWT) is a type of memory that has great relevance for real
life use. It is form of evidence that is given in court or in a police investigation from
somebody who has witnessed a crime or accident. However, there are many
questions to be asked about the accuracy of EWT. For example in the US, Wells et al
reported 40 cases where individuals were convicted on the basis of EWT but have
then been cleared based on DNA evidence.

The first factor that can affect accuracy of EWT is the use of schemas and the
reconstruction of an event which can distort memory. Schemas are a form of mental
organisation and are a very powerful aid to memory as they help us to make sense of
experiences and also remember them. Very important in the case of EWT. However,
the processes that aid the construction of a schema can cause inaccuracies in
memory for specific episodes. One way it does this is through guiding the selection
of what is actually stored in memory, so irrelevant information may be forgotten. It
also makes information be very generalised so there may be very little detail of an
event in memory and what is remembered can be linked to another event in
memory creating a distorted memory of the event. The way that current event are
reconstructed to make them constant with pre-existing schemas can make people
remember what they expected to see rather than what they actually saw.

Another factor that can affect the accuracy of EWT is the age of the witness. One
major question that has been asked is “are children less accurate witnesses than
adults?”. Dent (1988) found in an investigation that children usually (but not always)
provide fewer details when asked to recall an event without any prompting and also
performed worse in the same situation but when asked specific questions. Reasons
have been suggested for this being the case. One could be that children are more
suggestible than adults and may be much easier to be impacted by what they hear in
life and what people tell them and will accept these as the truth. Children’ memory is
also much more sensitive to time. As there is often a delay of around six months
after an actual crime to when witnesses give evidence in court children can very
easily forget a lot of the information. However, King and Yuille (1987) placed a
counter argument to this. They found in an investigation that if a child has an
interest in the topic they are asked to focus on, the children could match adult levels
of accuracy as they would pay more attention to it. It isn’t just children who can
sometimes give a more EWT. Some research has also shown that older people
perform worse than young or middle-aged adults. One example is Yarmley (1984)
who found that after being showed a staged event, 80% of elderly participants failed
to mention that an attacker had a knife in his hand compared to 20% of young
participants who failed to notice this.

Finally, misleading information can have a huge effect on a person’s ability to give an
accurate EWT. Usually misleading information comes after the event as post-event
information. Elizabeth Loftus has shown how this can distort memory by leading
questions and suggestions which can cause reconstructive errors especially when
information is misleading. The two types of misleading information are leading
questions and “after-the-fact” information questions. The first meaning questions
 Dean Sanders – 2/10/2010

which make it likely that a schema will influence the witness to give a desired
answer. For example “did you see the broken headlight” instead of “did you see a
broken headlight”. The second being where the witness is given new information
after the incident. Loftus and Palmer (1974) aimed to prove that the use of leading
questions could influence an participants estimate of speed. They activated different
episodic schemas of car crashes and assumed that emotionally-charged verbs like
“smashed” would result in a higher speed estimate that a more neutral verb like
“contacted”. Their results backed this theory up and showed that participants were
not very good at estimating speed and that the verb used had an effect on the
participants response.