Psychology 2990A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Procedural Justice, False Memory Syndrome, Cognitive Interview

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2990A/B
• Professor: Doug Hazlewood

Document Summary

The legal system assigns a great deal of significance to eyewitness testimony. However, the most common cause of an innocent person"s being convicted of a crime is an erroneous eyewitness: jurors tend to overestimate the accuracy of eyewitnesses. To be an accurate witness, a person must successfully complete three stages of memory processing: acquisition, storage, and retrieval of the events witnessed. Acquisition- the process by which people notice and pay attention to information in the environment (only a subset of information) Storage- the process by which people store in memory information they have acquired from the environment. Retrieval- process by which people recall information stored in their memory. Some factors limiting the amount of information about a crime that people take in are how much time they have to watch and event and the nature of the viewing conditions. Accuracy in identifying celebrities began to drop when the simulated distance exceeded 7. 5 meters as distance increases, eyewitness accuracy decreases.