Outline and evaluate research related to eyewitness testimony

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Sarah Keogh

Outline and evaluate research related to eyewitness testimony

     The definition of eye witness testimony is as follows: evidence supplied by a person(s) who has witnessed a specific event or crime, relying only on their memory.

     Bartlett (1932) was interested in the way a message gets distorted during the game of Chinese whispers. He wanted to see whether memories changed over time as a result of prior knowledge in the form of schemas. He presented English subjects with the War of the Ghosts story, which is a North American folk tale. He executed this to produce a conflict between the story content and the participant’s knowledge of the world. Bartlett’s theory of Reconstructive Memory suggested that recall is subject to personal interpretation dependent on our learnt or cultural norms and values.

     Subjects were asked to recall the story immediately afterwards and some time later. The results showed that the story had become more and more distorted with each recall; it became more westernized.

     Bartlett explained that because the story was from another culture, the participants found it difficult to understand. In order to make sense of the story, they added new details to make the story fit with what they knew about their world. For example, canoe changed to boat, and black substance from the mouth became blood.

     The reconstructive nature of memory therefore demonstrates that individuals reconstruct a memory when they are unable to remember everything. They attempt to fill in the ‘missing’ details with what they think has happened, based on their knowledge of the world, in the form of schemas.

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     To evaluate Bartlett’s study, it provided evidence for the reconstructive nature of memory. However the study only involved seven women and 13 men. This was a weakness as it was not a representative sample of a population. The participants were tested at different time intervals; this also can be seen as a limitation.  Bartlett stated that schemas only affected retrieval; however evidence suggests that schemas affect comprehension – encoding and storage. The study has low mundane realism as individuals were not asked to recall a story from a different culture in everyday life.

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