MAKE YOUR REVISION ACTIVE - PUT THE WORK INTO THE REVISION ACTIVITY SO THAT YOU CAN THEN DO QUICK, MINI REVISION EPISODES.
Homework 1st April 2011
Homework 1st April 2011
a) This 4 mark question appeared on an exam paper:
Outline how one research study investigated the accuracy of eyewitness testimony (EWT). (4)
However, your task is to outline the ONE main piece of research you prepared revision notes on today (that may be about EWT, individual differences etc... Please do this using the comments link below, you should then be able to see each others' work and have a further set of revision notes (plus you will be inclined to do it well because others will see it!!!)
b) If you have a TV or even better a video recorder watch the series of eyewitness BBC4 3rd 4th + 5th April 11:00pm. All on eyewitness testimony (click on hyperlink for details)
Fisher et al (1987) observed Police interviews and found that they asked short, closed questions to get specific answers, this resulted in the person being interviewed only giving short answers or their answer being cut off in the middle disturbing the recall of the event, leading to inaccuracy.
ReplyDeleteThe questions were not asked in the order they occurred during the event, this effected the recall of the interviewee as the event was muddled in their mind, meaning they could not follow the flow of events.
Research similar to this lead to Geiselman et al (1985) developing a new interview technique. In 1992 Fisher and Geiselman worked together to create the cognitive interview, this was based on proven psychological principles concerning effective recall.
The techinique comprises of four stages; Context reinstatement, Report everything, Recall in reverse order and Change perspective.
Geiselman tested this by showing participant a video and testing their recall using the cognitive interview, this resulted in improved memory. However, in general those interviewed using the cognitive interview give more incorrect information, this is because they give more information during the interview process than those interviewed using the standard interview technique.
Currently research is taking place in an attempt to make the cognitive interview more streamlined and less time-consuming in the hope it will be used more efficiently.
Lauren
Gemma
ReplyDeleteTomes and Katz 1997 suggested that certain types of people are more likely to be affected by misleading information than others. These people have certain characteristics which are they generally have poorer recall for the event so they wont be able to remember much about what happened, they have high scores on measures of imagery vividness and they have high scores of empathy which is associating with others peoples feelings. Also if the misleading information is obviously wrong then people are less likely to believe it so misleading information must be believable for people to think it actually happened. This shows that there are certain characteristics/factors that allow people to believe misleading information compared to others and it shows that not all misleading information is believed by the participants. However not everyone has these characteristics so other factors must also influence why people will believe misleading information.
Gemma
Christianson and Hubinette questioned 58 witnesses to real robberies. They found that those witnesses who were threatened were more accurate in recall and remembered more details than those witnesses who were not threatened and were just onlookers to the robberies. This is because those who were threatened would have been more emotional aroused. This also supports the Yerkes-Bobson Law in saying that arousal and anxiety can improve and help memory recall and accuracy in eyewitness testimony.
ReplyDeleteJess
Christianson & Hubinette (1993) found that fear does have an effect in eyewitness testimony. They asked people involved in real bank robberies, either as victims or as onlookers, about the incident for an interview 4 months after the bank robbery. The recall of the victims was more accurate than the onlookers, This suggests that people with high level of anxiety or stress has a better recall than those with low level of stress.
ReplyDeleteAlso, in Yuille and Cutshall study, there are cases of real-life recall where memory for an anxious / stressful event is still accurate, even some months later.
This shows that witnesses that is face to face with the criminal, would be able to recall more accurate than those who doesn't pay attention to the event.
However this opposes to Loftus (1979)theory, as he suggests as time goes by, people forget
specific details.
Hoiyee
Fisher et al (1987) observed Police interviews. They found that by asking shorter, closed questions to get specific answers the person being interviewed only gave short answers. Or, their answer was cut off in the middle which distorted the recall of the event, leading to inaccuracy.
ReplyDeleteThe questions were not asked in the order they occurred during the event, this affected the recall of the interviewee as the event became muddled in their mind. This led to them not be able to follow the flow of events.
In 1992 Fisher and Geiselman created the cognitive interview which was based on proven psychological principles concerning effective recall.
The technique is comprised of four stages; Report everything,Recall in reverse order, Context reinstatement and Change perspective.
Geiselman et al (1985) tested this new interview technique. He used videos, after which he asked two sets of people questions, one of the groups were asked using the cognitive interview technique which in general improved their recall.
Rebecca
Clifasefi et al 2006 looked into individual differences affecting eyewitness memory concerning alcohol consumption. He used two groups; one containing sober participants and another containing midly intoxicated participants. They were shown a video of students playing basketball. During the video a man in a gorilla suit walks across the screen. The results were that 82% of the intoxicated participants in conparision to 46% of sober participants didn't notice the gorilla. This backs up Steele and Joseph's alcohol myopia model (1990);the more intoxicated a person becomes the less attention they can give to peripheral tasks.
ReplyDeleteDeffenbacher et al 2004 also found that high stress levels affect recall.