Age in Eye Witness Testimony

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Age in Eye Witness Testimony. Eyewitness testimony is a legal term used when someone is giving a description of something there saw or heard to give evidence in court. It is very important, as what is said during an eyewitness testimony can heavily affect the case and influence conviction. This is why Eyewitness testimonies need to be reliable. Alot of factors affect the recall of Eyewitness testimonies, from the time between the encoding of the event, to the retrieval of the memory, a lot can happen as the information is retained. Information could be adapted, twisted, removed and added to the point where the information is not the same as it entered. But a factor into the reliability of EWT is Age. All ages are becoming present in the courtroom due to the large range of crimes we see today. For example, children are being called to the stand due to child abuse cases, amongst all other ages that are called to give an eyewitness account for an incident. Due to this psychologists and researchers wanted to see if there was a correlation between the age of an individual & the accuracy of EWT. Many experiments have been done to produce findings that show this. Parker & Carranza (1989) Took primary school kids and college students as participants(PP) for their test. The PP were shown a mock crime and asked to identify a certain individual during the photo identification test. The children had the highest rate of choosing the photos, however they were most likely to make mistakes of identification than college students. This shows that children are not the most accurate eye witnesses. Children & EWT. Because of their age, children have a lot of difficulty fully understanding the questions they are being asked during an interview especially the formal nature of the questions. A research into language and age by Carter et al found that children between the

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