PSYCHOLOGY ASSIGNMENT

Before Mid-Term examination, my psychology teacher assigns homework to search for any topic, which interested.As a law student, I chose the topic...

“Remembering and Forgetting of Eyewitness”

Eyewitness is the person who has seen a thing happens and can give evidence of it. Therefore, in the legal proceeding, eyewitness testimony is a powerful tool as a great evidence for the trial. However, sometime the testimony of eyewitness can be incorrect or unreliable; therefore, we have to study their memories as a part of human memory about remembering and forgetting.
There is a phrase of Huff & Rattner said “the single most important factor contributing to wrongful conviction is eyewitness misidentification”

There are three stages to examine human memory in case of eyewitness, They are…

Stage 1: Witnessing the incident.
When witnessing an incident, information about the event is entered into memory, however, research has shown that a number of factors can influence the accuracy of this initial information acquisition.Take the duration of the event being witnessed for instance. In a very simple experiment conducted by Clifford and Richards in1977, an individual is instructed to approach a number of police officers. They are told to engage in conversation for either 15 or 30 seconds. Thirty seconds after the conversation ends, the experimenter asks the police officer to recall details of the person they have just been speaking to using a 10-item checklist. The checklist contains items relating to the persons appearance such as hair colors, facial hair etc. The results of the study showed that in the longer 30-second condition, police were significantly more accurate in their recall.

Stage 2: Waiting period before giving evidence.
This stage is concerned with the period of retention between perception by seeing an incident and the subsequent recollection of that incident. Unsurprisingly, research has consistently found that the longer the gap between witnessing an incident and recalling the incident, the less accurate the recollection of that incident becomes. There have been numerous experiments, usually related to a staged event, that support this contention. For example, the study case of Malpass and Devine in 1981, for instance, compared the accuracy of witness identifications after 3 days (short retention period) and 5 months (long retention period). The study found no false identifications after 3 days but after 5 months, 35% of identifications were false.

Stage 3: Giving evidence.
The final stage in the eyewitness memory process relates to the ability of the witness to access and retrieve information from memory. In a legal context, the retrieval of information is usually elicited through a process of questioning and it is for this reason that a great deal of research has investigated the impact of types of questioning on eyewitness memory.
The most substantial body of research has concerned leading questions, which has consistently shown that even very subtle changes in the wording of a question can influence subsequent testimony.

From the three stages of experiment found that there is a problem of eyewitness testimony also. I found a case study in the internet. It is a study of American psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus who has conducted many experiments that demonstrate how eyewitnesses can reconstruct their memories based on misleading information. In one study, participants watched a videotape of a car accident involving two cars. Later, they were given a questionnaire about the incident, there is one question asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” For some groups of participants, however, the verb hit was replaced by smashed, collided, bumped, or contacted. Although all participants viewed the same videotape, their speed estimates differed considerably as a function of how the question was asked.

The average speed estimate was 32 mph when the verb was contacted, 34 mph when it was hit, 38 mph when it was bumped, 39 mph when it was collided, and 41 mph when it was smashed.

In a follow-up study, participants were asked a week later if there was any broken glass in the accident scene. In reality, the film showed no broken glass. Those questioned with the word smashed were more than twice as likely to “remember” broken glass than those asked the question with hit. The information coming in after the original event was integrated with that event, causing it to be remembered in a different way.

We can say that language could have distorting effect on eyewitness, which can lead to inaccurate accounts of eyewitness event. It is possible that the original memory had been reconstructed. However, it is also possible that the original memory may have been replaced or experienced interference. Therefore, questions or words used in police interviews of eyewitness are important. We can say that human memories of events tend to be fragile and easily to distort and reconstruct, for example by suggestions, misleading questions, and false information.
Not only the problem of language that distorting on eyewitness memories, but also the problem of duration. We found that the duration effects on human memory; longer time, more false identification found, because we forget it. We can explain the question “why people forget” ,that Under most conditions, people recall information better soon after learning it than after a long delay; as time passes, they forget some of the information. We have all failed to remember some bit of information when we need it, so we often see forgetting as a bother. However, forgetting can also be useful because we need to update our memories continually.