Eyewitness Testimony affects on memory

Eyewitness Testimonys and Cognitive Interviews

Eyewitness Testimony is the the evidence an eye witness provides in court with the intention of having it help to identify the attacker / person that committed the crime

This can be easily altered mentally - this can be from methods such as misleading questions and statements (Loftus et al case study) and from post-event discussion (Gabbert et al case study)

Cognitive Interviews are a special type of interview which use one of four techniques and are useful in the fact that they get the witness to provide more information than they would do under normal interview techniques.

A limitation with this type of technique is that whilst it does get the witness to recall more information, often not much of it is useful and therefore it seems like a waste of time. It also means you have to go through all the information the witness provided and work out what was useful and what isn't

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