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What Factors can affect the Accuracy of Eye Witness Testimony?

In court Jurors seem to find eye witness testimony very convincing. However, it can be inaccurate due to a number of factors which affect the three processes involved in memory; these are registration, storage and retrieval.

Factors that affect registration are to do with the situation in which an event is witnessed, such as, stress, detail salience (e.g. weapon focus), exposure time and, expectations and beliefs.

The level of stress experienced when witnessing a crime can affect the accuracy of eye witness testimony. This relationship can be shown by the Yerkes-Dodson law, which suggests that at very low levels of arousal performance is poor. Performance improves with moderate levels of arousal, and then falls again when arousal is high enough to be experienced as stress. The effect of stress on memory has been investigated in various psychological studies.

In Peters’ study (1988) participants going to a clinic for an inoculation met two people, a nurse who gave them the i...

Posted by: Amy Hetzel

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