Eyewitness testimony is crucial when it comes to trying to solve crimes, and sometimes eyewitness is the only option police have to solve a crime (Wells and Olson, 2002). When receiving an eyewitness testimony police tend to use a cognitive interview and it has been very important in shaping the approach police use to investigative interviewing (Dando, Wilcock, Milne, and Henry, 2008). A cognitive interview is a method of interviewing an adult witness by “establishing a rapport with the witness, minimizing interruption and distractions caused by the interviewer, and encouraging the witness to report all the details without guessing (Lapaglia, Wilford, Rivard, Chan, and Fisher).” The cognitive interview can also increase the total amount of correct information reported without increasing the amount of errors (Bekerian and Dennett, 1993). “False memories created by suggested misinformation and misattributed source not only feel real as true memoirs, they can be persistent (Myers, 2012: p. 329).”
This paper will discuss research evidence in examining whether misleading suggestion can alter a persons later memory reports, including after a cognitive interview.
The issue of misleading suggestions altering later memory and memory after a cognitive interview was addressed by Lapagila, Wilford, Rivard, Chan, and Fisher (2013). (Description of methods): The experiment was conducted a university in the Midwest and a university in the Southeast. A total of 102 graduate students took part in the study, 47 women and 55 men (mean age 20.5 years), 72 students were from the Midwestern University and 30 students were from the Southeastern University. Of those who participated in the study 66 of the students were non-Hispanic Caucasia...
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...ewitness testimony.
References
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“ Some Close Encounters of a Mental Kind ” by Stephen Jay Gould is about the tendency for our minds to ‘lie’ to ourselves because of a certain key phrase that can cause people to believe certain events happened. This can be done by altering the types of question you want the victim to hear. It can be a certain modified questions or the way the question are presented to us that can cause our answers to be slightly false.
False information provided by people, perhaps because believed it is what the interviewer wants to hear, The Hawthorne effect, invalidates it (Taylor, 1995).
Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera” (Walker, 2013). In fact, human memory is quite the opposite of a video camera; it can be greatly influenced and even often distorted by interactions with its surroundings (Walker, 2013). Memory is separated into three different phases. The first phase is acquisition, which is when information is first entered into memory or the perception of an event (Samaha, 2011). The next phase is retention. Retention is the process of storing information during the period of time between the event and the recollection of a piece of information from that event (Samaha, 2011). The last stage is retrieval. Retrieval is recalling stored information about an event with the purpose of making an identification of a person in that event (Samaha, 2011).
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Similar studies were done to a different set of college students and they tended to have the same results. After giving as much detail about each memory, the students were interviewed about what they may have written done about what they had remembered. During the last part of the experiment, each of the students were debriefed and asked to guess which memory they believed was false.
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From a legal standpoint, eyewitness memories are not accurate. Though they all illustrate the same concept, each paper described different ways eyewitness memories were altered. One’s memory can be misleading by their own attributions towards the situation, what they choose to see and not see, and if the individual has been through a single event or repetitive stressful events. As human beings, our memories on all matters are not concrete. When retelling stories, we tend to modify the situation and tailor certain events, making the information provided unreliable. An eyewitness testimony changes the track of a trial and information that is given to the court can be ambiguous and can cause bias towards the circumstances. Eyewitnesses can even be confident in their retelling of a situation and explain a complete event, when in fact, that particular event never
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