Eyewitness Testimony

• Misleading question: a question that is designed to make the individual recall a memory differently to how it actually was encoded
• Anxiety: a state of emotional and physical arousal
• Yorkes Dodson graph effects of anxiety:

  low levels of anxiety = low levels of accuracy

  high levels of anxiety = low levels of accuracy

  Moderate level of anxiety = high levels of accuracy
• Anxiety effect on EWT: moderate levels of anxiety proves to have optimal effect on recall because fight or flight response triggers high level of alertness
• 4 techniques of cognitive interview: CRRR

  • Change perspective
  • Report everything - every single detail no matter how small
  • Reinstate the context - mentally revisit the crime scene and reimagine using weather, feelings etc
  • Reverse the order
• Enhanced Cognitive Interview ( ECI ): extra techniques help memory retrieval

  • Effective eye contact
  • reducing Eyewitness stress
  • minimise distraction
  • open minded questions
  • encouraging witness to speak slowly