PSYC 2501 Lecture Notes - Lecture 28: Source-Monitoring Error, Eyewitness Testimony, Interference Theory
26 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Constructive nature
Thursday, March 29, 2018
12:33 PM
• Our memories are constructions of what we know and learn about the world and
the actual events
o 60 minutes: eyewitness testimony
• About the wrongful conviction of Ronald Cotton based on eyewitness
testimony
• Eyewitness testimony can be the most convincing type of evidence to a
jury, but as we have seen with memory research, it can be flawed
• In the US, 200 people per day are convicted because of eyewitness
testimony
• The use of DNA evidence has exonerated 354 people in the US who were
wrongly convicted of crimes after serving an average of 13 years in
prison
• 71% of those convictions involved eyewitness testimony
o Causes for errors in eyewitness testimony
• Weapons focus
▪ Tendency to focus on a weapon during a crime which causes poorer
memory for other things that are happening
• Errors due to familiarity
▪ Innocent bystanders may be accused of crimes based on familiarity
▪ Source monitoring error
• Errors due to suggestion
▪ Police officers may influence the witness with questions or
comments
▪ Can also happen in lineup
▪ Studies have shown that an experimenter saying "good, you
identified the suspect" in a fake lineup was enough to increase the
confidence that they picked the perpetrator by 32%
• The misinformation effect
• Occurs when a person's memory for an event is modified
by things that happen after the event has occurred
• Form of retroactive interference
• Types of interference
• Proactive interference
• Old information interferes with the retrieval of new
information
• Pro--going forward
• Retroactive interference
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