Age differences of Eyewitness testimony

1) What was the procedure?

2) What were the findings?

3) What is the evaluation?

1) Yarmey stopped 651 adults in public places and asked them to recall the characteristics of a young woman who they'd spoken to for 15 seconds just 2 minutes earlier.

2) All young (18-29), middle aged (30-44) and older (45-65) participants had the same accurcay in recall.

3) This is a good study because it follows the ethical guidelines-it does not put the particicpants in any serious danger. It is also good because there are participants of a wide age range. However, it is not realistic because the participants are not experiencing any anxiety that they would in a real life incident. Also, the participants are not tested on for a time longer than 2 minutes after the event which might not be realistic.

1) What was the procedure of this study?

2) What were the results?

3) What is the evaluation?

1) Memon studied the accuracy of young (16-33 year old) and older (60-82 year old) eyewitnesses. The participants were involved in an identification task 35 minutes after the crime and 1 week after it.

2) When the two groups were questioned 35 minutes after the event, there was no difference in the accuracy in recall. However, when there was a delay of 1 week, the older witnesses were less accurate than the younger witnesses.

3) This is a good study because it resembles real life events. But it is not good because there are no results for middle aged eye witnesses.