A time when I was an eyewitness to a non-violent crime was during a shoplifting case at a store. As I was finishing up at the checkout, I saw a group of teenagers grabbing snacks to put in their bags at the self-checkout, and exiting the store without paying for the items. This is when I realized I was witnessing a shoplifting attempt. At this moment, it was important for me to get a better view of what was happening, so I could have helpful information to share with the authorities. The information I knew I needed to store in my long-term memory included details about the shoplifters' physical appearance, clothing features, the sequence of events leading up to and during the crime, and the time and location of the incident. To encode the information …show more content…
In this case, I would use iconic and echoic inputs to activate my sensory memory. Iconic input represents the visual information coming in, and echoic input represents the auditory information coming in. Using iconic input allows me to focus on recalling the details of the crime and the shoplifters I witnessed. Using echoic input permits me to retain relevant information I heard being said during the crime. Then, actively thinking about the information would help reinforce it in my short-term memory, which helps get transferred to my long-term memory through elaborative rehearsal. Elaborative rehearsal is the ability to relate new information to previously stored knowledge or experiences. This plays an important role in long-term memory, as the more significant and relevant the details, the more likely the information will be encoded into long-term memory. Sensory memory has the briefest duration ranging from milliseconds to 3-4 seconds and has unlimited capacity. Short-term memory lasts around 20 seconds without rehearsal and has a capacity of 5-9 items, with about 7 items being the
The use of eyewitness statements and testimony’s can be a great source of information, but can also lead to wrongful convictions. Due to eyewitness testimony, innocent people are convicted of crimes they have not committed. This is why the wording of a question is important to consider when interviewing witnesses. Due to the fact that eyewitness testimony can be the most concrete evidence in an investigation, witnesses may feel they are helping an officer by giving them as much information as possible, therefore they may tell them information that is not entirely true, just to please them. This is why there are advantages and disadvantages to using open and close ended questioning at different durations of an interview. The way you word a question may impact the memory of a witness, this is because a person cannot completely memorize the exact occurrences of an event.
I Daniella M. Genzale was caught shoplifting from Sephora in Roosevelt Field Mall. I put two items of makeup into my pocket book and walked out of the store passing all points of purchasing.When I left the store the security made us stop and ask us to give them what items were taken and don't pretend nothing was taken because he watched us. Then we walked back into the store with the security and they took us into the back room, once we were there he showed us the video of us taking the items and calculated how much was stolen all together. We were in the room for about an hour before the police officers came and hand cuffed us. At this point I was in tears crying, I was worried my mom was calling me and she was nervous. I still don't understand
Eyewitnesses play a critical role in criminal justice systems throughout the world and are often essential in identifying, charging, and ultimately convicting perpetrators of crimes.
Mechanical or rote repetition of the information is a great way to remember this information. The more time you spend rehearsing the information the longer the information will be remembered. This is actually a poor way of remembering things because it doesn’t make the information meaningful; “surface processing”. Elaborative Rehearsal is a more effective way of remembering information through “deep processing”, which is relating the information to information you already know. This technique is used in more in the education system than maintenance rehearsal. Even with these two ways to store things we still run into filling errors. Filling errors are where your brain has filed information incorrectly. The final step in the memory process is retrieval. Retrieval is the locating of stored information and returning it into your conscious thoughts. There are a few cues that help us retrieve them, such as priming, context, and state. Priming is the nonconscious identification or words and objects, by referring in to particular representations or associations in the memory just before carrying out the action or task. The memories that come back to your conscious mind when you are in a certain place or area are called context, dependent memories. When you are in a certain emotional state you many retrieve memories of when you were also in that same emotional
Wells, G., Small, M., Penrod, S., Malpass, R. S., Fulero, S. M., & Brimacombe, C. (1998, November 6). Eyewitness identification procedures: Recommendations for lineups and photospreads. Law and Human Behavior. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/pss/1394446
Wells, G. L., Olson, E. A., & Charman, S. D. (2002). The confidence of eyewitnesses in their identifications from lineups. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(5), 151-154.
Memory plays a large role in our legal system. A person who witnesses a crime has to rely on recalling information, which isn’t always completely accurate. In Johnson (1993) paper she discusses ways memory interferes with the legal systems and what rules and regulations help prevent memory failure to interfere.
Memory is an important and active system that receives information. Memory is made up of three different stages sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory. According to the power point presentation, sensory memory refers to short storage of memory that allows an individual to process information as it occurs. Short term memory refers to memory that is only available for a limited time. It is information that is held for seconds or sometimes even minutes. Long term memory refers to memory that is stored for a long period of time and it has an unlimited capacity with the ability to hold as much information as possible. Retrieval is key and it allows individuals to have memories. Episodic memory refers to memory for events that we
In the court of law, eyewitnesses are expected to present evidence based upon information they acquired visually. However, due to memory processing, presenting this information accurately is not always possible. This paper will discuss the reliability of eyewitness testimony, its use in a relevant court case, and how the reasonable person standard relates to eyewitness testimony.
Eyewitness testimony has long been viewed as important evidence in court cases. The general population believes eyewitness identification more than any other evidence, even if the witness account is conflicting with the other evidence presented. Studies show that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and yet it is still considered the most important form of evidence. People think that if a person says they saw something then it must have happened. Currently there are no universal guidelines on how to obtain and present such evidence. The purpose of this paper is to explain why eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and discuss the proposed guidelines on how law enforcement agencies should gather identifications, as well how the courts should handle such evidence. The author will begin by providing a history of eyewitness testimony and the studies that have been done regarding the validity of eyewitness identifications. Next, she will discuss eyewitness identifications and why they are unreliable. Finally, she will address the proposed universal guidelines for law enforcement agencies and the courts.
The reliability of eyewitness identification is one the most important factors in the criminal justice system. It provides evidence to the court room about a criminal event and enables the jury to give a final verdict of the offender. The question at hand is whether the reliability of eyewitness testimony is sufficed to use as evidence in the court. The ability for a witness to give a detailed description of the event of a crime has many psychological factors that influence the accuracy of the eyewitness testimony. Factors that include distance of the crime, illumination of the area, the exposure of time, the presence of a weapon, the age of the witness, clothing worn by the perpetrator and the methods the law enforcements used to conduct the investigation. These are just a handful of factors influencing a person testimony however the two key concepts that will be evaluated is the age of the witness’ and how been weapon focus can play a role in wrongful conviction based on eyewitness identification. The main area of psychology that concentrates on eyewitness testimony is cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is associated with eyewitness testimony as memory, paying attention to detail and the intelligence of the eyewitness all contributes to an effective identification. Acquisition, retention and the retrieval stage are main three stages of memory that cognitive psychology concentrates on. It’s a study in how people are able to acquire process and store information. The purpose of the essay is to discover and evaluate factors that affect the accuracy of eyewitness identification with cases of how been weapon focus and been either been too young or too old can illustrate that eyewitness testimony ...
Memory is a group of related mental processes that are involved in acquiring, storing, and retrieving information (Hockenberry and Hocenberry page 232). I will be addressing two specific types of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory holds temporary information transferred from sensory memory or long-term memory. Sensory memory is the first stage of memory and obtains information for a brief amount of time. Short-term memory is also called active memory and is stored in the prefrontal cortex which is the most active part of the brain during an activity. Short-term memory can hold information for roughly twenty seconds, but sensory memory holds information for a shorter amount of time. We usually store things such
For the true event, the interviewer supplied accurate cues obtained from the caregiver while inaccurate cues were randomly assigned for the false event (p.293). Given that the false event had never actually happened, none of the participants were initially able to recall it. At this point, they were encouraged to use contextual reinstatement and scripted guided imagery techniques to recover the memory, both of which “have been shown to effectively generate details that form the foundations of false memories” (p. 293). All three interviews were conducted as consistently and systematically as possible across both the criminal and non-criminal conditions. The nature of the participants’ memory was probed each time they recalled an event; follow up questions were asked about the vividness of the memory, confidence in the memory as well as perspective of the memory.
Hence, rehearsal is a good way to memorize a piece of information. There are also two main methods of accessing a memory: recognition and recall. Recognition is the association of an event, or physical object which was previously experienced, or encountered. It involves a process of comparison of information with the stored memory. For example recognizing a familiar face in a crowd.
When an eyewitness is present in a criminal investigation they are asked to identify the suspect. Witnesses are asked the description of the perpetrator then the officers create a lineup off of the description with the most closely looking “suspects”. The identification of a suspect is very detrimental to a criminal investigation. It can be very useful in a criminal investigation if a suspect is identified, and no other sig...