Memory Accuracy - A03

• Loftus and Palmer - eyewitness testimony can be influenced by leading questions

  car crash - changing verbs

  more intense verb got faster speeds

  support for leading questions as it shows how they can influence memory accuracy

  when participants were brought back later and asked if they had seen broken glass, many participants had a false memory of broken glass - once again supporting the effect of leading questions
• Loftus and Palmer study evaluation

  • study may have suffered from demand characteristics as participants may have just given faster speeds due to believing that was what they were meant to do
  • study might have lacked ecological validity - participants may have had better recall had it been a real life event
• Loftus - the weapons study - looking into the effect of anxiety on memory accuracy

  • participants saw someone enter and leave the room with either a pen or a knife
  • they were then asked to recall the mans face
  • pen = 49% accurate , knife = 33% accurate
  • showed that anxiety has a negative effect on memory
• Yuille and Cutshall - effect of anxiety on memory accuracy

  • real life setting
  • investigated accuracy of shooting witnesses
  • findings did not support the yekes-dodson law
  • witnesses had really good recall of the event, despite having higher levels of anxiety
• evidence for the cognitive interview

  Geiselman created a fake scenario

  • man with blue backpack entered a lecture and stole a projector
  • geiselman compared the effect of leading questions in cognitive interview and standard interview
  • found that students who were interviewed with cognitive interview were less likely to be mislead by leading questions
• limitations of cognitive interview

  • less effective when reviewing children
  • to fix this, geiselman and fisher came up with the enhanced cognitive interview which aimed to grow trust between the interviewer and witness - this proved to be more effective when interviewing children BECAUSE interviewers are encouraged to not interrupt the witness
  • the witness is given more control to help with anxiety and they are also encouraged not to guess