Thejessicameyer

After witnessing a crime, as a victim or bystander, it is important to recall all the details you can as soon as possible. There are many factors that can alter a person’s memory about what they witnessed. One of the biggest problems of eyewitness testimony is based on people’s overconfidence in their own memory. Most people want to believe they can remember things very well and that what they remember is true. In the book Memory, the chapter “Improving your Memory” describes how people tend to blame social mistakes on their memory being bad instead of their stupidity (Eysenck B 469).

One of the biggest problems with eyewitness memory is misremembering the ground truth (Wright, Memon, Dalton, Milne, Horry 180). Ground truth is defined as what actually happened during the to be remembered event. There are many factors that could influence what or how an eyewitness remembers certain events.

Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve is a very important model to consider when talking about eyewitness memory (Myers 353). His research found that forgetting begins twenty minutes after learning information. Forgetting details so quickly is a big reason why the information of a crime must be collected soon after a crime has occurred. However, forgetting is not the only problem that can occur. Memories can be skewed due to many things.

In the textbook Memory, Eysenck spends an entire chapter discussing eyewitness testimonies and explains many examples that could cause faulty memory (Eysenck A 469-93). One issue discussed in the chapter is source misattribution, or source amnesia, which is the phenomenon to forget the source in which you got the memory. The most common example of this is when you see a photo or hear a story and think you remember the event when actually you are only remembering what you saw or heard. Source misattribution can effect an eyewitness’ recall if they are exposed to other versions of the story or leading questions. If they are told something about the case then their memory may start to change about what they think they remember themselves.

The chapter “Eyewitness testimony” explains the impact of stress and anxiety on eyewitness memory (Eysenck A 339-340). A stressful situation can lead to tunnel vision or weapon focus, making it hard to accurately retell the events of the incidence. It can be hard to remember specifics such as important details, the timeline of the incidence, or even the perpetrators face. With weapon focus, even if the victim is trying their best to pay attention to the perpetrator the stress caused from a weapon being present can take all the attention. Other causes of difficulty identifying a perpetrator could have to do with differences between them and the witness. Eysenck describes the role that race plays in identifying someone who committed a crime. It is harder for a person to see differences in someone that is ethnically dissimilar to themselves.

Wright et al express how they looked at archival/observational and field research of eyewitness testimony cases and concluded that it is difficult to conclude if the witness has good or bad memory (196). With both types of studies there are so many influences and such different cases and results that eyewitness memory is very hard to study. No one wants to believe that what they remember is inaccurate or that there are a number of things that can cause memory to be wrong, but there are.