Dr.

RAM MANOHAR LOHIYA NATIONAL LAW

UNIVERSITY
PSYCHOLOGY

Final Draft
On
Influence of Memory & Perception on Eye Witness

Submitted to: Submitted by:

Mrs. Tanya Dixit Kanishka Singh
Roll No.- 180101064
1st Year (1st Semester)

2017-2018

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 Acknowledgement

I have taken efforts in this research work. However, it would not have been
possible without the kind support and help of many individuals. I would like to
extend my sincere thanks to all of them.

I am highly indebted to Mrs. Tanya Dixit for his guidance and constant
supervision as well as for providing necessary information regarding the
research & also for his support in completing the research work.

I would like to express my gratitude towards my parents & elders for their kind
co-operation and encouragement which help me in the completion of this
research work.

And my special thanks to my college mates and library staff who have helped
me in developing this research work and people who have willingly helped me
out with their abilities.

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INTRODUCTION

Eyewitness testimony is a situational account of a witness of what is typically a crime

or an accident. It is a legal term that essentially describes when a witness or victim is
recounting their firsthand experience to another person or to a court . Eyewitness
testimony is what happens when a person witnesses a crime (or accident, or other
legally important event) and later recalls for the court all the details of the witnessed
event.

Eyewitness testimony is historically among the most convincing forms of evidence in

criminal trials (e.g. Benton, Ross, Bradshaw, Thomas, & Bradshaw, 2006). Probably
only a suspect’s signed confession can further convince a jury about that individual’s
guilt. But being convincing isn’t the same as being accurate.

The advent of DNA analysis in the late 1980s revolutionized forensic science,
providing an unprecedented level of accuracy about the identity of actual perpetrators
versus innocent people falsely accused of crime. DNA testing led to the review of
many settled cases. According to the Innocence Project, 358 people who had been
convicted and sentenced to death since 1989 have been exonerated through DNA
evidence. Of these, 71% had been convicted through eyewitness misidentification
and had served an average of 14 years in prison before exoneration. Of those false
identifications, 41% involved cross-racial misidentifications (221 of the 358 people
were African American). And 28% of the cases involved a false confession.

The level of perceptual load in a task determines the efficiency of selective attention.
Given that high load can result in individuals failing to report seeing obvious objects,
it is conceivable that load may also impair memory for the scene. Eyewitnesses are
less accurate under high load, in particular for peripheral details. High load memories
are more open to suggestions, showing increased susceptibility to leading questions.

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High visual perceptual load also affects recall for auditory information, illustrating a
possible cross-modal perceptual load effect on memory accuracy.

Why Is Eyewitness Testimony an Important Area of Psychological Research?

Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and

human memory.

When an eyewitness stands up in front of the court and describes what happened
from her own perspective, this testimony can be extremely compelling—it is hard for
those hearing this testimony to take it “with a grain of salt,” or otherwise adjust its
power. But to what extent is this necessary?

There is now a wealth of evidence, from research conducted over several decades,
suggesting that eyewitness testimony is probably the most persuasive form of
evidence presented in court, but in many cases, its accuracy is dubious. There is also

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evidence that mistaken eyewitness evidence can lead to wrongful conviction—
sending people to prison for years or decades, even to death row, for crimes they did
not commit. Faulty eyewitness testimony has been implicated in at least 75% of DNA
exoneration cases—more than any other cause. In a particularly famous case, a man
named Ronald Cotton was identified by a rape victim, Jennifer Thompson, as her
rapist, and was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. After more than 10 years,
he was exonerated (and the real rapist identified) based on DNA evidence.

There is also hope, though, that many of the errors may be avoidable if proper
precautions are taken during the investigative and judicial processes. Psychological
science has taught us what some of those precautions might involve, and we discuss
some of that science now.

Misinformation

Misinformation can be introduced into the memory of a witness between the time
of seeing an event and reporting it later. Something as straightforward as which
sort of traffic sign was in place at an intersection can be confused if subjects are
exposed to erroneous information after the initial incident.

In an early study of eyewitness memory, undergraduate subjects first watched a

slideshow depicting a small red car driving and then hitting a pedestrian
(Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978). Some subjects were then asked leading
questions about what had happened in the slides. For example, subjects were
asked, “How fast was the car travelling when it passed the yield sign?” But this
question was actually designed to be misleading, because the original slide
included a stop sign rather than a yield sign.

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Later, subjects were shown pairs of slides. One of the pair was the original slide
containing the stop sign; the other was a replacement slide containing a yield
sign. Subjects were asked which of the pair they had previously seen. Subjects
who had been asked about the yield sign were likely to pick the slide showing
the yield sign, even though they had originally seen the slide with the stop sign.
In other words, the misinformation in the leading question led to inaccurate
memory.

This phenomenon is called the misinformation effect, because the

misinformation that subjects were exposed to after the event (here in the form of
a misleading question) apparently contaminates subjects’ memories of what
they witnessed. Hundreds of subsequent studies have demonstrated that memory
can be contaminated by erroneous information that people are exposed to after
they witness an event. The misinformation in these studies has led people to
incorrectly remember everything from small but crucial details of a
perpetrator’s appearance to objects as large as a barn that wasn’t there at all.

These studies have demonstrated that young adults (the typical research subjects
in psychology) are often susceptible to misinformation, but that children and
older adults can be even more susceptible (Bartlett & Memon, 2007; Ceci &
Bruck, 1995). In addition, misinformation effects can occur easily, and without
any intention to deceive (Allan & Gabbert, 2008). Even slight differences in the
wording of a question can lead to misinformation effects. Subjects in one study
were more likely to say yes when asked “Did you see the broken headlight?”
than when asked “Did you see a broken headlight?” (Loftus, 1975).

Other studies have shown that misinformation can corrupt memory even more
easily when it is encountered in social situations (Gabbert, Memon, Allan, &

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Wright, 2004). This is a problem particularly in cases where more than one
person witnesses a crime. In these cases, witnesses tend to talk to one another in
the immediate aftermath of the crime, including as they wait for police to arrive.
But because different witnesses are different people with different perspectives,
they are likely to see or notice different things, and thus remember different
things, even when they witness the same event. So when they communicate
about the crime later, they not only reinforce common memories for the event,
they also contaminate each other’s memories for the event (Gabbert, Memon, &
Allan, 2003; Paterson & Kemp, 2006; Takarangi, Parker, & Garry, 2006).

The misinformation effect has been modelled in the laboratory. Researchers had
subjects watch a video in pairs. Both subjects sat in front of the same screen, but
because they wore differently polarized glasses, they saw two different versions
of a video, projected onto a screen. So, although they were both watching the
same screen, and believed (quite reasonably) that they were watching the same
video, they were actually watching two different versions of the video (Garry,
French, Kinzett, & Mori, 2008).

In the video, Eric the electrician is seen wandering through an unoccupied house
and helping himself to the contents thereof. A total of eight details were
different between the two videos. After watching the videos, the “co-witnesses”
worked together on 12 memory test questions. Four of these questions dealt
with details that were different in the two versions of the video, so subjects had
the chance to influence one another. Then subjects worked individually on 20
additional memory test questions. Eight of these were for details that were
different in the two videos. Subjects’ accuracy was highly dependent on
whether they had discussed the details previously. Their accuracy for items they
had not previously discussed with their co-witness was 79%. But for items that

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they had discussed, their accuracy dropped markedly, to 34%. That is, subjects
allowed their co-witnesses to corrupt their memories for what they had seen.

The discovery of these mistaken identifications and resulting wrongful

convictions has been a jarring event for the legal system and threatens public
faith in the criminal justice system

Identifying Perpetrators

In addition to correctly remembering many details of the crimes they witness,

eyewitnesses often need to remember the faces and other identifying features of
the perpetrators of those crimes. Eyewitnesses are often asked to describe that
perpetrator to law enforcement and later to make identifications from books of
mug shots or line ups. Here, too, there is a substantial body of research
demonstrating that eyewitnesses can make serious, but often understandable and
even predictable, errors (Caputo & Dunning, 2007; Cutler & Penrod, 1995).

In most jurisdictions in the United States, line ups are typically conducted with
pictures, called photo spreads, rather than with actual people standing behind
one-way glass (Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006). The eyewitness is given a set
of small pictures of perhaps six or eight individuals who are dressed similarly
and photographed in similar circumstances. One of these individuals is the
police suspect, and the remainder are “foils” or “fillers” (people known to be
innocent of the particular crime under investigation). If the eyewitness identifies
the suspect, then the investigation of that suspect is likely to progress. If a
witness identifies a foil or no one, then the police may choose to move their
investigation in another direction.

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Mistakes in identifying perpetrators can be influenced by a number of factors
including poor viewing conditions, too little time to view the perpetrator, or too
much delay from time of witnessing to identification.

This process is modeled in laboratory studies of eyewitness identifications. In

these studies, research subjects witness a mock crime (often as a short video)
and then are asked to make an identification from a photo or a live line up.
Sometimes the line ups are target present, meaning that the perpetrator from the
mock crime is actually in the line up, and sometimes they are target absent,
meaning that the line up is made up entirely of foils. The subjects, or mock
witnesses, are given some instructions and asked to pick the perpetrator out of
the line up. The particular details of the witnessing experience, the instructions,
and the line up members can all influence the extent to which the mock witness
is likely to pick the perpetrator out of the line up, or indeed to make any
selection at all. Mock witnesses (and indeed real witnesses) can make errors in
two different ways. They can fail to pick the perpetrator out of a target present
line up (by picking a foil or by neglecting to make a selection), or they can pick
a foil in a target absent line up (wherein the only correct choice is to not make a
selection).

Some factors have been shown to make eyewitness identification errors

particularly likely. These include poor vision or viewing conditions during the
crime, particularly stressful witnessing experiences, too little time to view the
perpetrator or perpetrators, too much delay between witnessing and identifying,
and being asked to identify a perpetrator from a race other than one’s own
(Bornstein, Deffenbacher, Penrod, & McGorty, 2012; Brigham, Bennett,
Meissner, & Mitchell, 2007; Burton, Wilson, Cowan, & Bruce, 1999;
Deffenbacher, Bornstein, Penrod, & McGorty, 2004).

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It is hard for the legal system to do much about most of these problems. But
there are some things that the justice system can do to help line up
identifications “go right.” For example, investigators can put together
highquality, fair line ups. A fair line up is one in which the suspect and each of
the foils is equally likely to be chosen by someone who has read an eyewitness
description of the perpetrator but who did not actually witness the crime
(Brigham, Ready, & Spier, 1990). This means that no one in the line up should
“stick out,” and that everyone should match the description given by the
eyewitness. Other important recommendations that have come out of this
research include better ways to conduct line ups, “double blind” line ups,
unbiased instructions for witnesses, and conducting line ups in a sequential
fashion (see Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, 1999; Wells et
al., 1998; Wells & Olson, 2003).

Kinds of Memory Biases

Memory is also susceptible to a wide variety of other biases and errors. People
can forget events that happened to them and people they once knew. They can
mix up details across time and place. They can even remember whole complex
events that never happened at all. Importantly, these errors, once made, can be
very hard to unmake. A memory is no less “memorable” just because it is
wrong.

For most of our experiences schematas are a benefit and help with information
overload. However, they may make it difficult or impossible to recall certain
details of a situation later.

Some small memory errors are commonplace, and you have no doubt
experienced many of them. You set down your keys without paying attention,

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and then cannot find them later when you go to look for them. You try to come
up with a person’s name but cannot find it, even though you have the sense that
it is right at the tip of your tongue (psychologists actually call this the tip-of-
thetongue effect, or TOT) (Brown, 1991).

Other sorts of memory biases are more complicated and longer lasting. For
example, it turns out that our expectations and beliefs about how the world
works can have huge influences on our memories. Because many aspects of our
everyday lives are full of redundancies, our memory systems take advantage of
the recurring patterns by forming and using schemata, or memory templates
(Alba & Hasher, 1983; Brewer & Treyens, 1981). Thus, we know to expect that
a library will have shelves and tables and librarians, and so we don’t have to
spend energy noticing these at the time. The result of this lack of attention,
however, is that one is likely to remember schema-consistent information (such
as tables), and to remember them in a rather generic way, whether or not they
were actually present.

False Memory

Some memory errors are so “large” that they almost belong in a class of their
own: false memories. Back in the early 1990s a pattern emerged whereby
people would go into therapy for depression and other everyday problems, but
over the course of the therapy develop memories for violent and horrible
victimhood (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994). These patients’ therapists claimed that
the patients were recovering genuine memories of real childhood abuse, buried
deep in their minds for years or even decades. But some experimental
psychologists believed that the memories were instead likely to be false—
created in therapy. These researchers then set out to see whether it would indeed

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be possible for wholly false memories to be created by procedures similar to
those used in these patients’ therapy.

In early false memory studies, undergraduate subjects’ family members were

recruited to provide events from the students’ lives. The student subjects were
told that the researchers had talked to their family members and learned about
four different events from their childhoods. The researchers asked if the now
undergraduate students remembered each of these four events—introduced via
short hints. The subjects were asked to write about each of the four events in a
booklet and then were interviewed two separate times. The trick was that one of
the events came from the researchers rather than the family (and the family had
actually assured the researchers that this event had not happened to the subject).
In the first such study, this researcher-introduced event was a story about being
lost in a shopping mall and rescued by an older adult. In this study, after just
being asked whether they remembered these events occurring on three separate
occasions, a quarter of subjects came to believe that they had indeed been lost in
the mall (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). In subsequent studies, similar procedures
were used to get subjects to believe that they nearly drowned and had been
rescued by a lifeguard, or that they had spilled punch on the bride’s parents at a
family wedding, or that they had been attacked by a vicious animal as a child,
among other events (Heaps & Nash, 1999; Hyman, Husband, & Billings, 1995;
Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999).

More recent false memory studies have used a variety of different

manipulations to produce false memories in substantial minorities and even
occasional majorities of manipulated subjects (Braun, Ellis, & Loftus, 2002;
Lindsay, Hagen, Read, Wade, & Garry, 2004; Mazzoni, Loftus, Seitz, &
Lynn, 1999; Seamon, Philbin, & Harrison, 2006; Wade, Garry, Read, &

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Lindsay, 2002). For example, one group of researchers used a mock-advertising
study, wherein subjects were asked to review (fake) advertisements for Disney
vacations, to convince subjects that they had once met the character Bugs
Bunny at Disneyland—an impossible false memory because Bugs is a Warner
Brothers character (Braun et al., 2002). Another group of researchers
photoshopped childhood photographs of their subjects into a hot air balloon
picture and then asked the subjects to try to remember and describe their hot air
balloon experience (Wade et al., 2002). Other researchers gave subjects
unmanipulated class photographs from their childhoods along with a fake story
about a class prank, and thus enhanced the likelihood that subjects would falsely
remember the prank (Lindsay et al., 2004).

Using a false feedback manipulation, we have been able to persuade subjects to

falsely remember having a variety of childhood experiences. In these studies,
subjects are told (falsely) that a powerful computer system has analyzed
questionnaires that they completed previously and has concluded that they had a
particular experience years earlier. Subjects apparently believe what the
computer says about them and adjust their memories to match this new
information. A variety of different false memories have been implanted in this
way. In some studies, subjects are told they once got sick on a particular food
(Bernstein, Laney, Morris, & Loftus, 2005). These memories can then spill out
into other aspects of subjects’ lives, such that they often become less interested
in eating that food in the future (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009b). Other false
memories implanted with this methodology include having an unpleasant
experience with the character Pluto at Disneyland and witnessing physical
violence between one’s parents (Berkowitz, Laney, Morris, Garry, & Loftus,
2008; Laney & Loftus, 2008).

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Importantly, once these false memories are implanted—whether through
complex methods or simple ones—it is extremely difficult to tell them apart
from true memories (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009a; Laney & Loftus, 2008).

Factors that may influence eyewitness testimony

Police, prosecutors and juries often rely on eyewitness testimony to determine
what really happened at the scene of a crime. While this may seem like a
concrete way to get a conviction, eyewitness testimony isn't rock solid and can
be affected by several factors. When you are the accused in a court case, it's
vital that the eyewitness testimony given is accurate and true. If you are facing a
long sentence or conviction of a serious crime, the eyewitnesses should be as
competent as possible.

Stress and anxiety

Anxiety or stress is almost always associated with real life crimes of

violence.  Deffenbacher (1983) reviewed 21 studies and found that the stress-
performance relationship followed an inverted-U function proposed by the Yerkes
Dodson Curve (1908). 

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After witnessing a crime, the stress and anxiety levels of an eyewitness are
likely to be at an all-time high. Research shows that the more stress a person
feels while viewing a violent attack, the less likely he or she is to remember the
details. Because violence almost always causes some type of stress or anxiety,
eyewitnesses who have seen violent crimes may be unreliable.

Along with violent crime, the presence of a weapon or gun at the scene of a
crime may also intensify the level of anxiety and stress, making it difficult for
the witness to remember details that are important to determining what
happened.

Reconstructive memories

Bartlett’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.

Experts agree that the human brain does not work like a videotape but is
influenced by societal and cultural norms. This means that memories may be

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influenced by factors in the lives of the eyewitness rather than what really
happened. The brain may take an unacceptable situation and warp it to fit in
with how the brain feels things should be. These reconstructive memories make
it hard to rely on eyewitness testimony.

Racial disparities

If the eyewitness is of a different race than the accused, there may be built-in
prejudices or racism that affect how the brain remembers the event. These are
difficult to account for and prove but can greatly influence the accuracy of the
eyewitness.

The implications of this can be seen even more clearly in a study by Allport &
Postman (1947). When asked to recall details of a picture which showed a white
man holding a razor, participants tended to report that it was the black man who
was holding the razor.

Clearly this is not correct and shows that memory is an active process and can be
changed to 'fit in' with what we expect to happen based on your knowledge and
understanding of society (e.g. our schemas).

Lack of distinct characteristics

If the accused lacks in distinctive characteristics, it's also hard for an eyewitness
to come up with a positive identification. If a person has obvious tattoos or is
extremely tall, this gives the eyewitness information to work with. The average
person walking down the street may be hard to remember, and testimony about
the person may not be accurate.

If your life and future hang on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, it's
important to guarantee that the witness is competent and knows exactly what

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happened. Part of a legal representative's job is to find reasons the testimony
may not be accurate and show how that can be applied to prove your innocence.

Weapon Focus

This refers to an eyewitness’s concentration on a weapon to the exclusion of other

details of a crime.  In a crime where a weapon is involved, it is not unusual for a
witness to be able to describe the weapon in much more detail than the person
holding it. 

Loftus et al. (1987) showed participants a series of slides of a customer in a

restaurant.  In one version the customer was holding a gun, in the other the same
customer held a chequebook. Participants who saw the gun version tended to focus
on the gun.  As a result, they were less likely to identify the customer in an identity
parade those who had seen the chequebook version

However, a study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) contradicts the importance of

weapon focus in influencing eyewitness memory.

Age of the Witness

It can be suggested that as witnesses become older, their memory declines,

meaning they may be seen as a less reliable witness in comparison to a younger
witness.

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CONCLUSION

To conclude, eyewitness testimony is very powerful and convincing to jurors,

even though it is not particularly reliable. Identification errors occur, and these
errors can lead to people being falsely accused and even convicted. Likewise,
eyewitness memory can be corrupted by leading questions, misinterpretations of
events, conversations with co-witnesses, and their own expectations for what
should have happened. People can even come to remember whole events that
never occurred.

The problems with memory in the legal system are real. But what can we do to
start to fix them? A number of specific recommendations have already been
made, and many of these are in the process of being implemented (e.g., Steblay
& Loftus, 2012; Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence,
1999; Wells et al., 1998). Some of these recommendations are aimed at specific
legal procedures, including when and how witnesses should be interviewed, and
how line ups should be constructed and conducted. Other recommendations call
for appropriate education (often in the form of expert witness testimony) to be
provided to jury members and others tasked with assessing eyewitness memory.
Eyewitness testimony can be of great value to the legal system, but decades of
research now argues that this testimony is often given far more weight than its
accuracy justifies.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• Laney, C. & Loftus, E. F. (2017). Eyewitness testimony and memory

biases. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series:
Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. DOI:nobaproject.com
• https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01322/full

• https://www.waukeshacriminaldefense.com/blog/2016/11/4-factors-
thatmay-influence-eyewitness-testimony.shtml
• http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-
9780199828340/obo-9780199828340-0026.xml
• https://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html
• https://www.psychologicalscience.org/uncategorized/myth-eyewitness-
testimony-is-the-best-kind-of-evidence.html

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