Eyewitness Testimony
This exercise asks you to consider the problems of eyewitness testimony.
1. Eyewitnesses to crimes are not always reliable; they think they remember the facts about an event, yet they make errors. Describe three psychological factors that might account for such errors.
2. If you were a police officer, lawyer, or prosecutor who had the job of interrogating witnesses and you wanted to increase eyewitness accuracy, what are two things you might do?
3. In general, how would a 10-year-old child be a more reliable eyewitness regarding the facts of an event than a 40-year-old adult, and vice versa? Why?
4. We are all eyewitnesses to our own lives, and we are not completely accurate in what we remember. Which of your autobiographical memories do you think might be somewhat distorted or inaccurate? Why?
Theories of Forgetting
Choose one recent situation in which you forgot (and later remembered) something important and describe this situation. Using the grid below, show how each of these theories of forgetting would explain your memory lapse:
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THEORY
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DEFINITION OF THEORY
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WHY YOU FORGOT
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HOW YOU COULD HAVE AVOIDED FORGETTING
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Levels of Processing
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Decay
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Interference
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Cue Dependent Forgetting
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