Py2 Loftus And Palmers Aims And Context

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Summarise the aims and context of loftus and Palmer (1974) reconstruction of automobile destruction: an example of the interaction between language and memory. The term eyewitness testimony (EWT) is a legal term, referring to the use of witnesses (or ear witnesses) to give evidence in court concerning the identity of someone who has committed a crime. EWT links to the cognitive approach because of the three stages in which it goes through three stages. The first stage is the witness encodes into long-term memory (LTM) details of the event and the people involved. Encoding may be only partial and distorted because some crimes happen very quickly. The second stage is the witness retains information for a period of time. Memories may be lost or modified during retention and other activities between encoding and retrieval may interfere with the memory. The third stage is when the witness retrieves the memory from storage. What happens during the reconstruction of the memory may significantly affect its accuracy. False eyewitness memory is the main factor leading to false convictions. The Innocence Project claims that eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful conviction in the USA, playing a role in more than 75% of convictions that were subsequently overturned through DNA testing. One explanation for the inaccuracy of EWT is that questioning by the police or other officials after a crime may alter witnesses’ perception of the events and thus affect what they subsequently recall. For example some questions may be more ‘suggestive’ than others. Leading questions may affect eyewitnesses’ ability to judge the speed of vehicles, because people are quite poor at judging the numerical details of traffic accidents, such as time, seed and distance. Marshal (1969) found that when Air force

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