What did Yuille and Cutshall find?
However, a study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) contradicts the importance of stress in influencing eyewitness memory. They showed that witnesses of a real life incident (a gun shooting outside a gun shop in Canada) had remarkable accurate memories of a stressful event involving weapons.
What type of experiment was Yuille and Cutshall?
Yuille and Cutshall’s experiment had ecological validity as it’s a field study (in a real environment and a real situation), meaning the behaviour was more likely to be spontaneous and natural.
What does Elizabeth Loftus say about eyewitness testimony?
“People embrace eyewitness testimony so uncritically,” Loftus says, “because they believe that memory can accurately and pristinely store events and replay them for you later on.” She designed and ran experiments to see how easily people’s memories could be influenced just by the way a question was worded.
Why is eyewitness testimony so important?
While its role is complex, eyewitness testimony is a crucial part of the criminal justice system. When a legal team presents an eyewitness who can confidently identify the suspect and confirm that they saw them commit a crime, jurors are compelled to believe them.
Why is eyewitness testimony used in court?
Using eyewitnesses to identify a suspect as the perpetrator to the crime is a form of direct testimonial evidence that is used for forensic purposes. It is used to establish facts in a criminal investigation or prosecution.
What role does the research of Loftus suggest about EWT?
Loftus’ research suggested that EWT was generally inaccurate and therefore, unreliable. may not represent real life because people don’t take the experiment seriously and/or are not emotionally aroused in the way that they would in a real car accident.
What is Elizabeth Loftus best known for?
Elizabeth F. Loftus, a professor of psychology and expert researcher on the malleability and reliability of repressed memories, is an instrumental figure in cognitive psychology. Loftus’ work has made a huge contribution to psychology and opened a unique and controversial aspect of psychology and memory.
How does Loftus and Palmer link to the cognitive area?
Why is Loftus and Palmer linked to the Cognitive area? L&P – they focus on how the Ps are influenced by internal mental processes as a result of the distortion of their memory from leading questions. L&P – gives evidence into the effects of information received after the event on a person’s memory of an event.
How useful is eyewitness testimony?
Eyewitness testimony is a potent form of evidence for convicting the accused, but it is subject to unconscious memory distortions and biases even among the most confident of witnesses. So memory can be remarkably accurate or remarkably inaccurate. Without objective evidence, the two are indistinguishable.
Why did Yuille and Cutshall interview real witnesses?
To compare interviews performed at the time that were carried out by a police officer with those carried out by research staff (which also incorporated misleading questions). Yuille and Cutshall interviewed real witnesses of a real crime. The witnesses had observed a gun shooting incident on a spring afternoon in Vancouver, Canada.
What was the outcome of the Yuille and Cutshall experiment?
Recall was found to be accurate and two misleading questions had no effect on recall accuracy, even after a long time. Yuille and Cutshall’s experiment had ecological validity as it’s a field study (in a real environment and a real situation), meaning the behaviour was more likely to be spontaneous and natural.
Are there any studies on eye witness testimony?
However, studies outside of the laboratory have found that people who had been in high-anxiety, real life situations produce more accurate and detailed EWT. Yuille and Cutshall (1986) looked into witnesses of a real life incident. Recall was found to be accurate and two misleading questions had no effect on recall accuracy, even after a long time.
Why are some eyewitnesses unreliable in their testimony?
Schemas are therefore capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconsciously ‘unacceptable’ information in order to ‘fit in’ with our existing knowledge or schemas. This can, therefore, result in unreliable eyewitness testimony.