Factors influencing reliability of eye-witness memory

• Leading questions can influence eyewitness memory and produce errors in recall. 
• When a weapon is used by a criminal the witnesses focus on the weapon rather than the criminal’s face.
• People are less able to recognise people from a different ethnic background to themselves.
• If there is a long period of time between recall and the incident, people are likely to forget details
• Loftus and Palmer (1974) found that they could affect participants’ recall by changing the way a question is worded so eyewitness memory is unreliable. -w
• Loftus et al. (1987) found that participants had worse recall for the customer’s face when they were holding a weapon, this reduces eye witness accuracy. -w
• Meissner and Brigham (2001) found that false identification was common, therefore witnesses have an own race bias, reducing accurate memory recall. -w
• • Yuille and Cutshall (1986) found no variation in eyewitness accuracy 5 months after the event, therefore eye witness memory of real crime can be reliable. -w
• • Laboratory experiments investigating eye-witness memory are replicable and therefore can be tested for reliability as they have a carefully controlled procedure such as viewing the same videos of a car crash. 
  • Laboratory experiments investigating eye-witness memory are high in internal validity because they have a controlled, artificial setting so can minimize the influence of extraneous variables such as distractions when assessing eye-witness recall of a car crash
• Researchers should be aware of the risk of potential harm to participants when using scenes of motor accidents to test eyewitness memory as participants may have been involved in a real accident which would cause them psychological distress to recall details from a video recording