Factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony
- Created by: Jazzy
- Created on: 21-05-13 14:30
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- Factors affecting the accuracy of eye witness testimony
- Anxiety
- Yerkes-Dodson Law
- A person's ability to recall information is related to their level of arousal
- A small amount of anxiety can be healthy and lead to better recall because your senses are heigtened
- Too much anxiety can cause the person to have trouble recalling the event due to stress
- Loftus and Burns (1982)
- Participants were shown a clip of an armed robbery: in one condition a boy was shot in the face and in the other he wasn't
- The participants that had seen the boy being shot in the face (more anxiety) were less able to recall accurately the armed robbery
- Peters (1988)
- Asked to identify the nurse and researcher from a set of photographs
- Partticipants were better at identifying the researcher because he wasn't associated with something anxiety provoking like the nurse
- Weapons Effect
- Loftus (1979)
- One group saw the man come out of a discussion with a pen
- The other group saw the man come out of a discussion with a plastic knife covered in blood
- They were then asked to identify the man and less identified the one with the knife (33%) because they were more focused on the knife itself
- Loftus and Messo (1987)
- Watched a person at a cashier getting money one with a gun and one with a cheque
- People were more focused on the gun than the cheque
- Watched a person at a cashier getting money one with a gun and one with a cheque
- Loftus (1979)
- Yerkes-Dodson Law
- Age
- Children
- 3-4 year olds are more prone to reconstructing an event when given a leading question - Ceci (2000)
- Language ability - understanding of the question can affect recall - Goodman and Scharff (1997)
- The Elderly
- They are more prone to the effects of leading questions - Cohen and Faulkner (1989)
- More likely to have inaccuracy of performance in picking out a person on an identity parade
- Children
- Misleading information
- Loftus (1975)
- Showed a large sample of students a video of a car driving along a country road and having an accident.
- 1 - "How fast do you think the car was going when it drove past the stop sign?" 2 - "How fast do you think the car was going when it drove past the barn?"
- A week later she asked "did you see a barn in the video" even though there wasn't any barn and the ones who had answered the barn question nearly 20% said yes
- Loftus and Palmer (1974)
- About how fast were the cars going when they .... each other
- smashed (40.5mph), collided (39.3mph), bumped (38.1mph)
- Loftus (1975)
- Anxiety
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