Eye Witness Memory

Eye Witness Memory

What is an eye witness?. An eye witness is a person who has seen a particular event taking place right in front of them. Eye witnesses memory must be accurate and to the point, as it crucial to an investigation. The eye witness memory can sometimes be inaccurate, you might say why? it has been discussed in the articles, which will be talked about in details below. The purpose of this paper is to give reader a greater insight about the eye witnessing and factors that affects the accuracy and completeness of the eye witness memory.

The first article that would be discussed here is the “Brewer, N., & Palmer, M. A. (2010). Eyewitness identification tests. Legal and Criminological Psychology”. The first point the author talks about is the difference between the confidence and accuracy of the eye witness. If the eye witness is strongly confident that the person they are claiming to be the suspect is the same person that they saw on the crime scene, police will not further have to investigate the case because they are depending solely on the statement of the eye witness, if not then it become hard. The concept of accuracy must be combined together with confidence because confidence and accurate information is what convinces the police that the person in question is in fact the one who committed the crime, on the other hand inaccurate information will delay the process for the police. Another concept the authors talks about in the article is the concept of identification latency. This terms refers to the fact as to how fast an eye witness can make his decision, the faster the decision is made, the more confident the police is in the accuracy of the information. Police should keep track of the amount of time it took the eye witness to answer the question so if needed later can provide judge with the information. Accurate information must not have any biases involved . The authors talks about the concept of double-blind line up administration. Facts must be separated from baises because this could cause eye witness to deliberately pick the innocent or foils. The concept of double-blind lineup concept removes the biases of the by keep the line up administrator away from the investigation officer so the lineup administrator has no information as to who the suspect is . Also if the administrator communicates with the witness, they have can some what influence on the decision made by the eye witness and can lead to misidentification.

The second article that will be discussed is the “Kramer, T. H., Buckhout, R., & Eugenio, P. (1990). Weapon focus, arousal, and eyewitness memory”. This article details about a concept of the weapon focus, which talks about how in a stressful situation, witness tend to focus more on the weapon and things surrounded it rather than the perpetrator and can give perfect description of the weapon but not the culprit. The authors discusses few experiments to prove that the accuracy of the eye witness reduces as they tend to focus more on the weapon involved, the study showed when the participants were shown a seconds worth of a clip, less than half of them were able to somewhat identify the culprit. All of the participants identified the weapon and had a clear image of it in their mind, even though, the culprit face was shown in the clip longer than the weapon. Another experiment, which they referred to as “experiment 2A-2D”, authors talks about how the study showed that as if the nature of the crime is violent, eye witnesses tend to have less accurate description of the culprit than the eye witnesses in a non-violent situation because violent crimes tend to have a more stressful impact on the individuals . So what initiates the weapon focus?.. In actual crime scene , weapon focus occurs because of the crime itself and intensifies with the presence of the weapon. When we are faced with high stress situation , specially involving a weapon we tend to fixate on that object and thats all we have left in the memory.

Moreover, the third article that does a really good job of explaining the accuracy of eye witness memory and factors that affect it is “Morgan, Charles A., I.,II, Hazlett, G., Doran, A., Garrett, S., Hoyt, G., Thomas, P., . . . Southwick, S. M. (2004). The author Morgan talks about when people are faced with highly stressful situation, their memory encoding is affected to a point that they don’t remember any thing at all. She says if experiments are to be done, U.S. Army survival school training program is a perfect model for prospective, objective evaluation since it imitates that same threat to life situation. She also talks about how eye witnesses who have been through these stressful situations before will tend to have better memory than people experiencing for the first time , since experience helps them deal with the situation better because they have already dealt with it before.

True positive:

The term true positive means that the eye witness takes the least amount of time and identifies the culprit right of the bat, which best represents the accuracy of the information.

False positive:

when the eye witness is unable to remember the actual culprit and picks an innocent person or foil from the lineup.

True negative:

which means that the eye witnesses memory is good and have a clear description of the culprit in their head and if they are there in the lineup they will be recognized but if they are not present there, eye witness will know right away.

False negative:

means that the eye witnesses was really moved by the incident that they just cannot remember the person even when they are presented right in front