WITNESS TESTIMONY

Witness Testimony

Witness Testimony

The term 'eye witness testimony' refers to an area of research into the accuracy of memory concerning significant events, it is legally considered to be a reliable account of events. However, research into eye witness testimony has found that it can be affected by many psychological factors such as, anxiety and stress, reconstructive memory, selective attention and leading questions. Anxiety and stress can be associated with many factors such as, violence and crime. Selective attention is when the witness is able to describe one detail, giving them less time to pay attention to other details. It can also be because the witness is more likely to focus on a detail with more emotional significance, such as a weapon.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has been particularly concerned with how subsequent information can affect an eyewitness's account of an event. She began her research on traumatically repressed memories and eyewitness accounts. Loftus suddenly found herself in the midst of sexual abuse stories and defending accused offenders. In 1974, her research thrust her into the courtroom to testify in over 200 trials as an expert witness on the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies based on false memories, which she believed to be triggered, suggested, implanted, or created in the mind. Her main focus has been on the influence of (mis)leading information in terms of both visual imagery and wording of questions in relation to eyewitness testimony. Loftus' findings seem to indicate that memory for an event that has been witnessed is highly flexible. If someone is exposed to new information during the interval between witnessing the event and recalling it, this new information may have marked effects on what they recall. The original memory can be modified, changed or supplemented. She has dedicated most of her life's work and energy to creating a vivid and brilliant model and theory showing that the memory is amazingly inventive and fragile. She has done innumerable studies of over 20,000 subjects showing that eyewitness testimonies are often unreliable and that false memories can be triggered in up to 25 percent of people merely by suggestion or giving of incorrect post event information. The majority of Loftus' research focuses on repressed sexual abuse memories from childhood, that suddenly reappear in adult women often twenty years or more after the events took place. Her work raises enormous doubt about the validity of long-buried memories of trauma.

Loftus and Palmer argue that two kinds of information go into a person's memory of a complex event. The first is the information obtained from perceiving the event, and the second is the other information supplied to us after the event. Over time, information from these two sources may be integrated in such a way that we are unable to tell from which source some specific detail is recalled. All we have is one 'memory'. This argument is called the reconstructive hypothesis.

One way in which we could criticise this argument is to recognise that it is not only the type of question asked but also ...