Memory and Eyewitness Testimony Problems, Research Paper Example

Eyewitness testimony is considered one of the most truthful and reliable practices in the United States; upon swearing an oath, and being the eyewitnesses of crimes, people who provide the testimony are given the highest level of trust in making decisions on the blame of defendants. Nevertheless, it was a long ago as in the 1970s that the ability of eyewitnesses to give accurate and credible testimony was doubted, and the research in memory and eyewitness testimony was initiated.

The facts casting doubt on the eyewitness credibility derive from the intricacies of human memory, and the identified ability to alternate the memories about the crime with the help of thoughtful introduction of false information. Loftus was the first researcher to test the potential impact of misinformation on the consequent testimony of witnesses. The study included showing a car at a crossroads with two kinds of signs, a yield and a stop one. After the experiment interviews included misleading questions with the shift of the sign (substituting the yield sign with a stop sign in the question), and the result showed remembering a false image by the witnesses (Engelhardt, n.d.).

The revolutionary revelation of Loftus initiated serious research in the field of memory and eyewitness testimony problems, and the first step was towards the truth of mechanisms affecting the influence of misinformation on the initial remembrances of witnesses. The question of original memory was raised, showing that the distortion of facts always occurs from the first moment of memory formation (Engelhardt, n.d.). The reason for this is that people are always biased, and they form their remembrances through the prism of their unique personality. Therefore, the facts are stored in their memory not in the original form, but in the personally shaped one (Engelhardt, n.d.).

Personal bias is another serious threat to human testimony, as well as to memories about certain facts. The influence of emotions and style of remembering on the details that can be recollected later on by witnesses has also been experimentally proved. Incriminating details tend to be the most remembered ones in cases of witnessing a crime, but the later retrieval reveals doubts in the details that used to be so vivid at the immediate period after the crime (Engelhardt, n.d.).

Taking all those findings into account, research on estimating the level of eyewitness testimony and their accuracy entered an active phase, with much attention paid to the evaluation tools being potentially able to provide numeric or statistical data on the correlation of eyewitness accuracy, effect of third party influences and confidence-accuracy relationships within the framework of eyewitness testimony in court, where the stake is conviction of a guilty or an innocent defendant.

One remarkable work in the field is the study of Martire and Kemp (2009) on the issue of tying subjective factors such as the witness confidence, manner, and condition to the level of trust given to them by jurors. In addition, one group of jurors was informed about witness confidence as being a strong predictor of accuracy, and another group was told the opposite (Martire & Kemp, 2009). The results showed that though a serious portion of witnesses gave wrongful and inaccurate testimony, the jurors informed about the strong probability of accuracy related to confidence tended to believe them much more than those who were misinformed about the relationship.

Therefore, the conclusion was made by authors that the factual connection of juror beliefs about witness confidence in giving testimony is closely related to the outcomes of their decisions. Though the study was a fictional one, it clearly showed that though there is no scientifically proven correlation of confidence in testimony with its accuracy, those jurors who believe there is some are more inclined to believe the witnesses whose confidence is 70% and higher (Martire & Kemp, 2009).  The implication of the present study is to identify the further effect of confidence and accuracy on jurors and to make more applicable conclusions on whether they can be correlated or not for the sake of judicial justice.

Another study highly helpful in the present context is the one of Chan and Langley (2010) about the retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES) effect that can be produced on witnesses after giving testimony by introducing the misinformation on the crime about which they provide testimony. It has been experimentally proven that the human memory needs re-stabilization after data retrieval (that is, testing on the issue of memories about the crime) has occurred. If the re-stabilization opportunity has not been given to the witness, introduction of misinformation makes the memories highly vulnerable, and enables the third party to weld the wrongful information on the event into the witness’s memory (Chan & Langley, 2010).

Data retrieval in the situations with eyewitness testimony (especially the immediate one after the crime has been detected and witnesses found) has the dual effect on the data retention; on the one hand, it significantly increases the volume of data retention because of the activation of the recollection process that helps the witness cover the facts once more and reaffirm them in the remembrances. On the other hand, it is a dangerous practice, because right after the data retrieval process and predisposition to misinformation can damage the individual’s memory on the issue (Chan & Langley, 2010). RES has been found to be a long-lasting phenomenon, and it was not confined to items participants could not recall initially (Chan & Langley, 2010). Therefore, the research on RES offers much innovative thought about the processes of testimony emergence and evolution before the court hearing, and can put the testimony into serious question.

Finally, the article of Buck, Warren, and Brigham (2004) may serve as a concluding remark on the issue of eyewitness testimony credibility and problems. The study of the researchers pertained to eyewitness testimony in cases of child sexual abuse, with two model situations observed. In one case, the jurors were introduced to a written interviews of the victim of abuse (in those situations when children-victims decided not to appear in court to avoid additional stress), some of them being good and others average or bad. Another model situation included hearsay testimony in court (Buck et al., 2004). As the study showed, the effect of good interviews was mostly the same – the defendant was convicted, while the quality and content of the hearsay testimony did not have any difference for the jurors (Buck et al., 2004).

The articles considered in the present study imply that the human memory is not perfect, and there is an urgent need for research on the level of eyewitness credibility, accuracy and trustworthiness because of the potential threats to innocent defendants becoming victims of false beliefs and memories. Many irrelevant factors such as eyewitness confidence are still considered to have direct correlation with accuracy, and the emotions of both witnesses and jurors are often seen as the decisive factor in making the verdict. The trust posed on eyewitness testimony should be undermined with regard to modern research, and innovative psychological tools should serve as additional proofs of testimony credibility for the sake of justice.

References

Buck, J.A., Warrren, A.R., & Brigham, J.C. (2010). When Does Quality Count?: Perceptions of Hearsay Testimony about Child Sexual Abuse Interviews. Law and Human Behavior, vol. 28, no. 6, pp. 599-621.

Chan, J. C. K., & Langley, M. M. (2010). Paradoxical Effects of Testing: Retrieval Enhances Both Accurate Recall and Suggestibility in Eyewitnesses. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0021204.

Engelhardt, L. (n.d.). The Problem with Eyewitness Testimony. Stanford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 1:1, pp. 1-6. Retrieved November 22, 2010, from http://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/images/pdf/engelhardt.pdf

Martire, K.A., & Kemp, R.I. (2009). The Impact of Eyewitness Expert Evidence and Judicial Instruction on Juror Ability to Evaluate Eyewitness Testimony. Law and Human Behavior, no. 33, pp. 225-236.