Eyewitness Memory

Eyewitnesses of an event, whether it is traumatic or not, can create false memories and insist a specific event happened when in reality, it did not. Their memories are vulnerable to an assortment of errors in remembering precise details and their memories can be manipulated, causing a distorted occurrence that on no occasion happened. After reading three research papers on memory blindness with eyewitnesses, it has been proven that eyewitness accounts are not completely accurate and also shows how attributions, choice blindness, and certain circumstances play a role when they are asked to recall the event.

Keywords: Eyewitness, memory, memory blindness, false memory, attributions, choice blindness, traumatic events

Eyewitness Memory Blindness:

From a legal standpoint, eyewitness memories are not accurate. Though they all illustrate the same concept, each paper described different ways eyewitness memories were altered. One’s memory can be misleading by their own attributions towards the situation, what they choose to see and not see, and if the individual has been through a single event or repetitive stressful events. As human beings, our memories on all matters are not concrete. When retelling stories, we tend to modify the situation and tailor certain events, making the information provided unreliable. An eyewitness testimony changes the track of a trial and information that is given to the court can be ambiguous and can cause bias towards the circumstances. Eyewitnesses can even be confident in their retelling of a situation and explain a complete event, when in fact, that particular event never

People fail to notice when they are presented with something different from what they originally chose and tend to come up with explanations as to why they picked that specific choice. In this research paper, Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, & Loftus discuss how choice blindness can lead to distorted eyewitness memories. In their experiment, they studied if the participants in their research realized modifications to their memory reports and if these changes could possibly effect the participants’ memory. Cochran et al. (2016) conducted two different experiments. Experiment 1 was constructed on two self-sourced vs. other-sourced between participants and two misinformation vs. control within participants. They had participants watch a slideshow that showed a woman intermingling with three other characters and one of them steals her wallet. Then they completed a personality measure in a 15 minute retention interval which was followed by questions about their memories from the slideshow. After, they were given another 15 minute retention interval and then shown their responses to the memory question, but three of their responses were revised. According to Cochran et al. (2016), “experiment 1 demonstrated that when witnesses were exposed to altered versions of their own memory reports for episodic details of an event, their memories changed to be consistent with those altered reports”. In experiment 2,