Eye Witness Testimony

How research into memory and forgetting could be applied in a real-life setting. E.g. Eyewitness Testimony

Research into memory carried out by Bartlett in 1932 (as cited in Cardwell et al 2000) has found out that people recall events inaccurately due to the reconstructive nature of memory. Using his research on the War of the Ghost where he presented an unfamiliar North America folk tale to English participants and later ask them to recount the details of the story, Bartlett found out that individual participants distorted some strange information in the story and added materials that make sense to them.

In supports of Bartlett’s idea, Cohen 1993 and Brewer and Treyens 1981 (as cited in Cardwell, et al 2000) believe that memories are stored in terms of our past experiences or schemas. To illustrate this, according to Cardwell, et al (2000), they conducted an experiment where 30 participants were asked one at a time to wait in an office like room containing 60 objects for 35 seconds. Among the objects were a desk, calendar, typewriter and few incompatible objects like a brick, skull and a pair of pliers. The research found out that participants recalled “items with high schema expectancy i.e. typical office items while the incompatible items such as brick were unsuccessfully recalled”. Brewer and Treyen’s experiment showed that “people can sometimes falsely remember objects that did not exist”, according to Cardwell et al (2000).

However, Bartlett’s research on the ghost story was criticised by Gauld and Stephenson (1967 as cited in Cardwell, et al 2000) who tested the validity of Bartlett’s experiment in a similar study. They found out that “errors were significantly reduced where participants were given explicit instructions that highlighted the importance of accurate recall”, (Cardwell, et al 2000).

The study into memory has led many psychologists to research and understand why eyewitness testimonies are most of the times unreliable and inaccurate. In 1997,...