Anxiety – witnessing a crime may make us anxious. Giving evidence as an eyewitness may make us anxious. High levels of anxiety have been found impair our ability to store and retrieve memories.
Age – memories and the way that we use them change as we age. These three things influence child’s testimony: suggestibility, language ability and memory processes.
Cognitive Interview is one way to help people remember something accurately. It is based on two principles: Organisation and Context-dependency.
Organisation – the way that memory is organised means that memories can be accessed in various ways. A series of actions can help – first you did this, then you did that and so on until you reach your memory.
Context-dependency – memories are context-dependent, meaning that they are linked to the situation in which they were encoded.
Cognitive Interview uses four techniques: reinstate the context, change sequence, change perspective and report everything.
Reinstate the context – help the interviewers go back in their mind to the context in which they encoded the memory.
Change sequence – changing the order in which events are recalled can be very beneficial as it ensures details are not skipped and gaps can be filled.
Change perspective – interviewers are encouraged to recall events from the perspective of an observer.
Report everything – every detail is reported regardless of how irrelevant something may seem. It could stimulate memory that could be important or relevant.
Improving Memory
If memory is organised, and the more organised it is the better it operates.
There are five strategies for Improving Memory. These are described below.
Method of Loci – putting the items in locations in the familiar place. It is good for learning ideas and the connections between them.
Narrative Chaining - If you like making up stories, then you may prefer this method of remembering lists.
This can be used for a list of any length, and involves the items to be remembered being incorporated into a story, which is then run through in your mind when you need to recall the items.
Acronyms – form a word or phrase from the first letters of a list of items to be remembered.
Elaboration – it is where information is made meaningful and therefore encoded in a way that suits long-term memory.
Keyword Technique – a three stage technique.
- Acoustic stage – the word is pronounced.
- Visual image stage – make an image out of the ‘item’ and the English word.
- Rehearsal stage – rehearse the image and commit it to memory.
This technique is particularly good for learning a foreign vocabulary.
Bibliography
- New 2008 AQA ‘A’ Specification – AS level Psychology written by Nigel Holt and Rob Lewis.
- Google search