Key Issue – Cognitive

For this section you need to be able to: (a) Describe one key issue of relevance to today’s society and apply concepts, theories and/or research (as appropriate) drawn from the Cognitive Approach to explain the issue. Suitable examples: flashbulb memory reliability of eyewitness testimony the use of the cognitive interview Note: in examination, students may be given stimulus material from a key issue to explain using concepts, theories and/or research (as appropriate) from the Cognitive Approach.

Is Eyewitness Testimony Reliable?

An Eye Witness is someone who witnessed an event and is later asked to recount the event from memory. This account is used in a criminal justice setting and is often the corner-stone of the prosecution case. Research has found that juries pay particular attention to eye witness testimony in reaching a verdict.

Eyewitness testimony refers to an account given by people of an event they have witnessed. For example, they may be required to give a description of a robbery or a road accident someone has seen. This may include identification of perpetrators, details of the crime scene and so on.

Elizabeth Loftus has argued that eye witness testimonies should be treated with caution and demonstrated through numerous studies that memory could easily be distorted by leading questions.

The Devlin Committee was set up to investigate the use of eye witness testimony in court. It found that many people have been convicted of serious crimes by eyewitness testimony alone. For example 82% of suspects chosen from an identification parade were convicted and 74% of cases where eye witness testimony was the only evidence were judged guilty.

The Devlin Report recommended that the trial judge be required to instruct the jury that it is not safe to convict on a single eyewitness testimony alone, except in exceptional circumstances or when there is substantial corroborative evidence.

Whilst there is considerrable evidence which supports the findings that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, not all research supports the findings of this argument. For example, in a study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) that looked at a real life crime it was found that the reports of the crime were extremely reliable with most witnesses giving accurate information. When the researchers asked leading questions these had little effect.

Loftus developed the theory called the reconstructive hypothesis to explain how memory can be distorted and therefore why we should not trust eyewitness testimonies. She argues that two kinds of information go into a person’s memory of an event. The first is the information obtained from perceiving an event, and the second is the other information supplied to us after the event (e.g. the question containing hit or smashed). Over time, the 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’.

Other information that you have learnt during this course may also explain why memory is not always reliable and be used to improve the reliability of eye witness testimony.

Cue dependent memory can be used to help increase the amount of accurate detail recalled by an eye witness.  Police reconstructions reactivate context cues that were present at encoding to help trigger recall of the events. By putting the witness back into the context in which the event happened they will recall more detail. This assumes the original memory is available but not accessible without the right cues.

This may also be true of state cues—witnesses to crimes make be stressed and anxious. If left too long before being interviewed this state will change possibly affecting their ability to recall. By interviewing the witness as soon as possible this effect will be minimised. Immediate interview might also help to avoid trace decay affecting the memory of the event, as if left too long without recalling the event this theory suggests that the memory trace will fade away and be unavailable.