PSYC 3310 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Eyewitness Identification, Cognitive Dissonance, Cognitive Interview

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3310
• Professor: Caroline Erentzen

Document Summary

Memory trace the biochemical representation of our experience in the brain: this occurs in the process of storage errors, our memories become more vulnerable to revision and corruption. Same-race faces are processed in a configural manner (processing the face as a unified whole), while other-race faces are processed in a feature-based manner (each component processed individually) Arousal/threat hypothesis a hypothesis that attempts to explain the weapon focus effect; eyewitnesses have difficulty recognizing the perpetrator of a violent crime because their attention is focused on the danger represented by the perpetrator"s weapon. Unusual item hypothesis attempts to explain the weapon focus effect; eyewitnesses have difficulty recognizing the perpetrator because their attention is drawn to the perpetrator"s weapon or some other unusual object rather than the perpetrator"s face. Unconscious transference the unintentional act of misidentifying one person for another because a face that is familiar from one context is transferred to the scene of a crime.