cognitive key question

• key question?

  based on theories of memory, is eye witness testimony too unreliable to trust?
• planned intro?

  state kq, EWT: information given by a witness after seeing a crime which is recorded by the police and given as a verbal testimony in court trials. EWT cannot be trusted in society since 375 exonerations have occurred since 1989, 69% of them involving eye witness identification. The jury pay extra attention to EWT, so it's crucial in criminal trials. theories of memory can help us understand the unreliability of memory

  • mention Ronald Cotton, misidentified by Jennifer Thompson and spend over 10 years in prison for rape which could've been avoided if testimony was reliable
• multistore model (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968)?


  for info to be transferred to long term memory it has to be rehearsed. decay will occur if there is no rehearsal so witness could forget important details. it's important for the statement to be given to the police in good time after the incident to decrease chances of details decaying overtime (link with Cotton and Thompson)
• reconstructive memory (Bartlett 1932)?


  post event information like leading questions and discussions with other witnesses can result in inaccurate memory by altering the memory of an event based on schemas and expectations. leading questions shouldn't be used when questioning a crime

  • example, Loftus and Palmer (1974) found the a verb in their critical question used to describe a car crash affected estimation of speed (31.8 vs 40.8), police need to ask more open questions for the accuracy of testimoys.
• long term memory (Tulving 1972)?


  long term memory consists of semantic (factual information) and episodic (personal experiences). episodic is susceptible to transformation (reconstructive memory) so cognitive interviewing should be used which includes techniques like 'reinstate everything'- context cues aid recall by triggering further information increasing reliability

  • Godden and Baddeley (1975), when scuba divers learn and recall a list of words underwater they perform twice as well when learning and recalling in different contexts)