Eye Witness Testimony

2362 Words10 Pages
Eyewitness testimony is a legal term which refers to an account given by people of an event they have witnessed. The process of eyewitness testimony goes through three stages which are: encoding the information into long term memory, retaining the information within long term memory and the retrieval of information from storage. This is a complex process, thing can go wrong. It is possible the encoding maybe partial because a crime may have been committed very quickly. There may have been a weapon involved. Memories can be forgotten when trying to remember a scene. ‘Other activities between encoding and retrieval may interfere with the memory itself’, Cardwell & Flanagan (2008). There has been a lot of conflicting evidence to support and contradict the theory “Eyewitness testimony is so unreliable that it should never have been used in convicting criminals.” This essay will examine the psychological research which has focused on factors which affect the reliability of eyewitness testimony, such as the role of leading questions, stress, and individual differences such as age. Sir Frederick Bartlett’s theory of reconstructed memory suggested recall is subject to interpretation dependant on our learnt or cultural norms and values, and the way a person makes sense of their world. People store information in a way that makes most sense to them. They are constantly organising information into schemas. Schemas are mental ‘units’ of knowledge that correspond to frequently encountered people, objects or situations. Schemas allow individuals to make sense of surroundings so they can have an understanding and quite possibly predict what should be happening next. Schemas will always unconsciously fill in the gaps of memory based on stereotypical views and expectations. Memories are constantly constructed and reconstructed in terms of schemas, and therefore subject to
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