A01

• Define eyewitness testimony

  The evidence provided in court by a person who witnessed a crime, with the aim of identifying the perpetrator
• Name and outline the two types of misleading information

  1. Leading questions - the way a question is worded can influence your recall

  2. Post event discussion - when witnesses discuss an event and their memory can get contaminated by things that other people say
• Name the researchers who investigated the effect of leading questions

  Loftus and Palmer (1974)
• Describe the procedure and findings of Loftus and Palmer's (1974) first experiment

  - 45 students were asked to watch a video of a car crash

  - asked a question ('how fast were the cars going when they . . . each other?) and the verb used in the question was changed for each group

  - the verbs used were contacted, bumped, collided, hit, smashed and varied in their degree of 'charge'

  - it was found the more charged the verb, the higher the speed estimate
• Describe the procedure and findings of Loftus and Palmer's (1974) second experiment

  - they carried out another experiment whereby they got 150 participants to watch the video of the car crash and asked the same question

  - a week later they were asked whether they saw any broken glass, even though there was no broken glass in the video

  - participants who were given the more charged verbs were more likely to report seeings broken glass as their memory of the original event was distorted due to one word in a sentence
• Name the researchers who investigated the effect of post event discussion

  Gabbert et al. (2003)
• Describe the procedure of Gabbert et al. (2003)

  - pairs of participants watched a video of a crime which was filmed from different points of view - each participant could see elements in the event that the other couldn't

  - pairs then discussed what they had seen before completing a recall test
• Describe the findings of Gabbert et al. (2003)

  - 71% if participants mistakenly recalled aspects of event they did not see but had picked up in discussion

  - in a control group where there was no discussion, this figure was 0%