Loftus & Palmer).īartlett ’s theory of reconstructive memory is crucial to an understanding of the reliability of eyewitness testimony as he suggested that recall is subject to personal interpretation dependent on our learnt or cultural norms and values, and the way we make sense of our world. Misleading questions need not have the same effect as has been found in laboratory studies (e.g. There are cases of real-life recall where memory for an anxious / stressful event is accurate, even some months later.Ģ. The Yuille and Cutshall study illustrates two important points:ġ. One weakness of this study was that the witnesses who experienced the highest levels of stress where actually closer to the event, and this may have helped with the accuracy of their memory recall. Recall was found to be accurate, even after a long time, and two misleading questions inserted by the research team had no effect on recall accuracy. The police interviewed witnesses, and thirteen of them were re-interviewed five months later. A thief stole guns and money, but was shot six times and died. They showed that witnesses of a real life incident (a gun shooting outside a gun shop in Canada) had remarkable accurate memories of a stressful event involving weapons. However, a study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) contradicts the importance of stress in influencing eyewitness memory. As witnessing a real crime is probably more stressful than taking part in an experiment, memory accuracy may well be even more affected in real life. This means that for tasks of moderate complexity (such as EWT), performances increases with stress up to an optimal point where it starts to decline.Ĭlifford and Scott (1978) found that people who saw a film of a violent attack remembered fewer of the 40 items of information about the event than a control group who saw a less stressful version. Deffenbacher (1983) reviewed 21 studies and found that the stress-performance relationship followed an inverted-U function proposed by the Yerkes Dodson Curve (1908). Anxiety or stress is almost always associated with real life crimes of violence.
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