The Influence Of Misleading Information Psychology Essay

Published Date: 23 Mar 2015

Using Loftus study on the influence of misleading information on an individuals eyewitness testimony, it was predicted that after viewing a video clip, there would be a compelling difference amid participants who were misled due to misleading questions and participants who were not misled. Additionally, it was predicted that participants would be increasingly misled from information derived from that of a truck, opposed to that of a church. Critical misleading questions about a church and a red truck were a necessity, when in reality both did not exist; questions about the original event were additionally used. Twenty-five participants answered misleading post-video questions and twenty-five participants answered non-misleading questions. Analyses revealed that participants were greater influenced by the questions in the misleading condition; church (M = 1.36, SD = 0.50) and truck (M = 1.28, SD = 0.46). Consequently, advocating the hypothesis that misled participants can have their eyewitness testimony influenced due to misleading post-event information. Recommendations were manufactured for both questioning and design of the study in future experiments.

Introduction

Eyewitness testimony is considered a legal expression. It refers to an account given by an individual, of a selective occurrence that they have formerly witnessed. The criminal system alone relies profoundly on an individual's eyewitness testimony for investigating and prosecuting crimes. Thousands of individuals have been faced with criminal ligation as a consequence of questionable memories. The unreliability of an individual's eyewitness testimony poses a critical aftermath in the administration of criminal justice. It is well established that information that is encountered following an event can alter subsequent retention of that event. Conjointly, in the aftermath of an event, any erroneous information can derail a police investigation; as focus may be put on an innocent individual while the actual culprit remains unidentified.

Memory operates in three principle stages. The strategies which are associated in the retrieval of memory accurately involve; encoding, storing and retrieval. Information from an environment must be encoded before entering into the working brain; once the information is encoded it then requires being reserved within the brain. The information can be stored in the short-term memory or consequent to rehearsal and alternative components moved into the long-term memory. The information can then be retrieved from the brain when desired. When a complex incident is cultivated, it is suspected that some of the features of the event are extracted and stored. The eyewitness must decide which aspects of the visual stimulus they should attend to and therefore encode and store that knowledge. Our visual environment contains a tremendous amount of information, and only a small proportion of that information is actually perceived.

The contents of one's memories are subject to influence from a number of factors, including parents, friends, the media, photographs etc... However, eyewitness testimony research has demonstrated that suggestibility is one of the most substantial factors that influenced the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Suggestibility is the characteristic of being more inclined to accept and act on the suggestions of others. According to Benton and Bandura (1953) individuals who experience stressful or intense emotions are more receptive to ideas and consequently more suggestible. Suggestibility focuses on how the memory can be influenced by certain situations we find ourselves in and how that memory can become distorted over time. Wagstaff (1991) described suggestibility as the influence on one person from another by implanting an idea in the individuals head. Additionally, Binet (1900) proposed that suggestibility is a number of phenomena's including; obedience to an authority figure, conformity, bias and stereotyping, confabulation (unconscious errors of a vivid imagination) and unconscious processes due to distraction or an altered state of consciousness.

As early as 1907, a German psychologist Hugo Munsterberg published a book that was called 'On the Witness Stand' which demonstrated that professional observers (e.g. doctors and lawyers) could surprisingly report inaccurate events that had been staged for them. Their accounts were found to be frequently inaccurate when recalling crucial details. Munsterberg believed that children were significantly more prone to errors. He recommended careful questioning of all witnesses to minimise suggestible responding. After his book, the legal establishment largely ignored Munsterberg's claims and on an account of this, psychology lost interest in the problems that Munsterberg identified. Despite this, his work has been exceeding influential in recent generations.

Sporer (2008) believes that modern studies into eyewitness testimony owe a substantial amount to William Stern. Stern (1871-1938) was fully aware of the controversy that came along with post-event information, suggestive questions and false memory induction. Nonetheless, he emphasised the importance of error and deception. Stern used these to illustrate that an individual's standards and truthfulness differ when being questioned. Truthfulness may vary due to perceived consequences.

Psychological research over the past century has consistently exposed significant errors in eyewitness testimony. Perjury is a crime, as lying whilst on the stand can affect the course of justice. However, perjury is defined as knowingly making a false statement, merely misremembering is not a crime. If an individual witnessed a crime, the witness is likely to be interviewed by many people. Firstly, they would be interviewed by the police to help gain as many clues as possible, if the case extends to the legal system then the witness will be further questioned by lawyers before eventually testifying in court. It is additionally expected that the witness will replay the event outside the context of the legal system to friends, family or health care professionals in an attempt to help understand and overcome the terms of the event. All these techniques that the witness has used talking about the event may affect the accuracy of the event witnessed, as the original details may be replaced with false details (Loftus, 1975). This false information that has been received after the original event witnessed may be due to a number of different factors. Any misinformation may be a result of presuppositions in questions about the original event (Loftus and Palmer, 1974), it may occur due to narrative allegedly written by the experimenter (Tversky and Tuchin, 1989) or other sources such as a defence lawyer (Dodd and Bradshaw, 1980), it may have come from other witnesses of the same crime (Gabbert, Memon and Allan, 2003), or it may be generated by the witness themselves (Zaragoza et al, 2001).

Additionally, according to Hyman (1994) an eyewitness is believed to recall the event in a distinctive nature depending on certain factors, such as the audience. When recalling the witnessed event to an authority figure (police or experimenter) the witness would focus greater on perceptual and temporal details rather than one's own personal reactions to the event. On the other hand, the eyewitness's account that is recalled to a friend or therapist is likely to be focusing on one's emotional reaction about the witnessed event rather than the facts.

Psychologists should familiarise the jury system of the errors that can manifest in retrieving memories and aim to improve the accuracy and assessment of eyewitness accounts. Although the legal system is taking miniature steps in this direction, more should be done to guarantee that innocent individuals are not sentenced, due to flaws in false eyewitness testimonies. Therefore, eyewitness testimony should not be used solely for evidence.

Literature Review

"Eyewitness testimony is the most damning of all evidence that can be used in a court of law" (Loftus, 1996). Elizabeth Loftus is a superior figure in the field of eyewitness testimony research. She has demonstrated through the use of leading questions and post-event information how it is possible to distort a person's memory of an event. She believes that psychology has the potential to improve legal decision-making and avoid miscarriages of justice.

Greene and Loftus (1984) estimated that there may be as many as 8,500 wrongful convictions every year. Half of these involve false eyewitness testimonies. In June, 1958 a women called Mary Killean testified in court that a man called Fred Capon was the man who previously broke into the shop she worked at in Chicago and stole $254 at gunpoint. Capon was sentenced for armed robbery even though he pleaded not guilty and had a strong alibi from his Wife who stated that at the time of holdup Capon was in Indiana. Killean's testimony reveals that she positively identified the defendant at the trail. Eyewitness testimony was, in this case, the pivotal factor in determining the verdict. This case study shows how the serious implications of false eyewitness testimonies have on innocent people.

Many memories occurring in everyday life involve profoundly complex, largely visual, and often fast-moving events. When a person witnesses a highly complex and sudden event, the individual's perception of the event will not be an identical copy of the original event. These gaps in the memory rely on general knowledge about the world we live in to fill those memory gaps. The most influential way to fill those gaps is from information received after an event; this information may be misleading and become imbedded within the memory of the actual event, therefore making the reality of the event bias. We are rarely required to provide precise recall of such experiences, but on certain occasions recall is demanded, such as witnessing a crime or an accident. When an individual has witnesses a critical event, they are commonly asked a series of questions regarding what happened. It is well known that eyewitnesses are vulnerable to post-event misinformation; this is erroneous information that is encountered after viewing the original witnessed event.

The majority of research that has been established into the influence of eyewitness testimony tends to be conducted in a corresponding way. Participants fundamentally view an arrangement of slides depicting an event such as a traffic incident. The participant's then apprehend new information about the event, such as questions about the event. The participants in the misled condition receive new information which provides misleading information about a detail from the original event (e.g., a stop sign might have appeared in the original event, but the new information suggests a yield sign). The subjects in the non-misled condition (control group), the new information provides no specific information about a critical detail. Fig. 1 summarises the experimental design.

Fig. 1. Table showing typical experimental design.

After being presented with new information, participants in both conditions are given a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test on what they saw in the slides. A question is presented about the critical detail (e.g., What type of sign was seen in the video?), the choices are the original item that was distinguished in the video (stop sign) and the item that was bestowed in the new information (yield sign). There is a steady finding that misled participants perform considerably poorer than control participants on the test question about the critical item.

According to Harris (1973) the wording of a question after an occurrence may alter the answer. His participants were informed that the experiment concentrated exclusively on the accuracy of guessing measurements. They were then queried on one of two questions, such as 'how short was the player?' or 'how tall was the player?' Participants were more predisposed to say the player was shorter when the word 'short' was employed to ask, and vice versa for the 'tall' question. This study demonstrates that the wording of a question can affect the answer.

In an investigation of eyewitness testimony, Loftus and Palmer (1974) provided evidence that eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate due to leading questions acquired after a witnessed event. Participants were presented with a short film of a traffic accident and were then directed to answer questions related to the accident. The participants were interrogated about the momentum of the vehicle in several contrasting ways. The words used to illustrate the accident were; smashed, bumped, hit and contacted. It was established that the word 'smashed' exchanged the witnesses memory as they estimated the speed to be greater, remembering the accident as being more overwhelming than it had genuinely been. This study demonstrates that leading questions can mislead eyewitnesses and affect the accuracy of memory recall. This manifestation furthermore proposes that an individual's memory report was not naturally mental replays of the event experienced, but memory was a reconstruction that was staged using post-event information.

Similarly, there is further evidence to commend that eyewitness testimony can be erroneous. Loftus (1975) scrutinised the usefulness of misleading post-event information. Two groups of participants were exposed to an identical video of a car travelling down a lane. They were then asked one of two questions. The first group were asked how fast the car was travelling when it passed the stop sign, whilst the second group were asked how fast was the car travelling when it passed the barn? When in fact, there was no barn. A week later all participants were asked if they observed the barn. Loftus found that notably more people in the second group stated seeing a barn. This demonstration is unmistakable support for the hypothesis that misleading information received after the event, can influence the memory of the event itself.

Furthermore, Loftus (1977) conducted an experiment on college students to distinguish that witness's memories can become 'blended' due to post-event information. The students were bestowed with a number of coloured slides of a road traffic accident. A red car knocked down a pedestrian which was witnessed by a driver of a green car who did not stop. Participants were misled that this latest car was blue. The misinformed participants were more likely to conform to selecting a blue or bluish-green colour (from a choice of colours) for the car that did not stop than the control group. This study provides conformation of blended memories, a blend of green (the colour of the witnessed event) and blue (the colour suggested).

Loftus and Pickrell (1995) supervised a study into how accurate real life memories are when presented with false memories. Participants comprehended a list of childhood experiences that their family had corroborated as true, however one event was indeed false (being lost in a shopping centre for a considerable time when 5-6 years old and being assisted by an elderly person and reunited with their family). They found that 25% of participants believed that this event was genuinely true. Furthermore, around 20% of the participants embellished the event with further 'recalled' details from their 'memory'. This study demonstrates that if the individual is advised by a trusted person (their family) that something commenced, then they are more acceptable to false information and to therefore 'reconstruct' a memory of that event. Consequently, if an individual witnesses an event with a trustworthy person who observed an item that they didn't (e.g., broken glass) the individual would be more inclined to report seeing the broken glass, when in fact they didn't see any glass.

Clancy et al. (2002) looked into false memories of recovered alien sightings. They studied 3 groups of people; Abductees, who had no autobiographical memory of the event, Abductees, who's memories had 'recovered', and Non-abductees. The participants were given a critical lure test where the item stayed consistent with schema (e.g., exposed them to items such as 'sour, sugar, honey, tart, etc.). The aim was to discover whether the participants would falsely recognise 'sweet' as a critical lure. They observed that recovered memory alien abductees were more plausible to falsely recognise words not seen previously. It was argued that this was due to source monitoring, misattribute an internally generated memory as an externally generated memory (e.g. from TV).

However, not all research supports these findings. Research by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) found that in some circumstances witness recall can be extremely accurate. They looked at witnesses of a shooting in a town in Canada. A man had attempted to rob a gun shop, during the robbery the shop keeper was shot and returned fire killing the would-be robber. The event occurred in the middle of the day, in front of a large number of witnesses. A few months after the incident, fifteen witnesses agreed to recall their vision of the event. Yuille and Cutshall detected that the witnesses were able to recall the incident in a great deal of detail and that the witness's accounts were not influenced in response to leading questions. These findings, which are obtained from a real-life setting and are therefore high in external validity cast doubt on the validity of Loftus and others conclusions.

Additionally, several researchers have questioned whether misleading information 'over-writes' or replaces the original event and stating that the original information is not lost from memory, but is merely rendered inaccessible. McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) argue that misleading post-event information has no effect on memory for the original event. They believe there are two arguments to expect poorer misled than control performance even if misleading post-event information has no significant effect on the participants ability to remember the originally witnessed event. Firstly, misleading information is thought to bias the responses of participants who, for reason unrelated to the presentation of misleading information, do not remember what they originally witnessed. In the control group, participants who do not remember the original event will guess on the two-alternative test questions, and should only be correct 50% of the time. However, in the misled condition expected performance for not remembering participants is less than 50% correct. Therefore, misled participants who do not remember the originally witnessed event, but do remember the misleading post-event information will presumably choose the latter on the test, and will be systematically incorrect. Secondly, some misled participants who remember both the original information and the misleading information may choose the latter on the test; this may be due to them trusting the information in the post-event narrative more than their own recollections of the original event.

There is a colossal amount of work into the influence of misleading information; previous studies however have rarely examined the influence of sentence types and structures presented in post-event questioning. Post-event information can be presented in many different forms, including an affirmative statement (It is a red truck), a question (Is it a red truck?) or even a negative statement (It is not a red truck). Lee and Chen (2013) investigated whether the influence of post-event information presented in an affirmative form may have on the misleading effect. They used post-event narratives containing misleading information rather than direct questions containing misleading information (as used in previous studies). The post-event narrative did contain questions; however participants did not have to answer questions about the original event before the final memory test. They found that post-event information presented in an affirmative statement form produced a misleading effect. The post-event misleading information increased the participant's recall of misleading items and impaired their recall of correct items. This pattern of results did not appear when post-event information was presented in question form.

The amount of vulnerable witnesses that testify in court has increased significantly in recent years in the majority of Western counties. The most common of these are children, the elderly and witnesses with learning disabilities. William Stern (1910) a German psychologist conducted a study on children to provide evidence that a child's eyewitness testimony can be biased easily. Stern asked children aged 7-18 years old to recall certain details of a picture that they had studied previously. The children were then given questionnaires, some of which had misleading questions. Stern reported that the misleading questions produced the most errors and the younger children were easier to influence.

To support this, Poole and Lindsay (2001) gave 3-8 year olds a science demonstration. Afterwards, their parents read them a story which included information from the demonstration as well as new information. The children were then asked questions just to do with the science demonstration. It was discovered that the children mixed up a lot of the new information from the story (post-even information) into the original memory of the demonstration. When they were asked very carefully to give the information from just the science demonstration, some of the older children made their account more accurate, on the other hand the younger children could not do this. Suggesting that eyewitness testimonies of children, especially young children, may be flawed as their memories are easily distorted by post-event information. The reliability of a child's memory for an experienced witnessed event may depend on the time from witnessing the event to testifying. Younger children tend to forget information a lot faster than older children, so the time delay between the witnessed event and testifying is critical (Howe, 1991). These conclusions have been further supported by Gordon et al. (2001) who reviewed child witness research and concluded that children's statements are easily influenced. However, child based research can be criticised. It is very difficult to be certain that research using young children is valid, as it is hard to be confident that the children understand the instructions given or if they are paying attention. If not, the data that the children provide is invalid. Additionally, researchers may misinterpret a child's answers and jump to conclusions about the meaning of the child's statement.

Research has moreover suggested that elderly individual's eyewitness testimony may be inaccurate. In general, recall has been found less accurate compared to young adults, whether it's a slide show (Yarmey and Kent, 1980), or a video clip (Holliday et al, 2011). Yarmey (1984) in addition found that elderly eyewitness testimonies can be less accurate due to staged events. He staged an event where a man was holding a knife. He found that 80% of elderly individuals failed to mention the knife compared to only 20% of younger adults.

Individuals with learning disabilities are another group of eyewitness who are regarded in psychology and the criminal system as vulnerable witnesses. According to Milne and Bull (2001) adults with learning disabilities are typically reported as slower than normal developing adults to encode, store and retrieve details of an event. Studies have detected that individuals with learning disabilities are more susceptible to the negative effects of social demand factors. Kebbell and Hatton (1999) reported that adults with learning disabilities are more likely to answer 'yes' to questions irrespective of the content of such questions, they are likewise more inclined to make up answers. Therefore, caution must be taken when using eyewitness testimonies from individuals with learning disabilities.

The accuracy of eyewitness testimony may additionally be affected by the level of anxiety an eyewitness experiences at the time of the incident. Most laboratory based research has suggested that a high level of anxiety impairs recall and therefore reduces the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Loftus (1979) engineered a situation where participants in a waiting room could hear a conversation between two people behind a closed door. Half the participants heard an innocent conversation and saw a man leave with a pen, whilst the other half heard an angry conversation with breaking glass and saw a man leave with a blood-stained knife. Loftus established that participants who had witnessed the peaceful scene were more accurate in identifying the man who left the room from a set of 50 photos than those participants who had witnessed the violent scene. Loftus states that this may be due to the anxiety of the bloody weapon narrowed the participant's attention away from the man's face. Additionally, Loftus and Burns (1982) exposed participants to crime videos' of varying levels of violence. Participants who watched a boy being shot in the face had a less accurate memory of the incident and any information running up to the incident than participants who watched a less violent crime. This supports the idea that anxiety may make eyewitness testimony less accurate.

However, these studies on anxiety can be criticised for lacking external validity. In real life situations, high levels of anxiety may not have poor recall accuracy as these laboratory studies suggest. Christianson and Hubinette (1993) in fact showed that high anxiety in real life situations may make memories more accurate and detailed. They surveyed individuals who had witnessed bank robberies. Some participants had simply witnessed the robbery, whilst other participants had been threatened by the robbers. It was found that those participants who had actually been threatened (and so presumably had experienced more anxiety) had more accurate recall. This finding suggests that the findings of laboratory experiments into the effect of anxiety on eyewitness testimony may not reflect real life and therefore we should be cautions when drawing conclusion based on their data.

The aim of this study is to extend to the numerous amounts of psychological evidence which warns the justice system of problems with eyewitness testimony. Jurors need to be made aware that confident, trustworthy witnesses can be mistaken. Evidence from Elizabeth Loftus states that using an individual's eyewitness testimony alone is an unreliable source of evidence as the individual may have been influenced by post-event information or other factors and therefore the testimony may not always be accurate in determining criminal justice. This study will concentrate solely on the effects of post-event information that may be received after witnessing an event.

The hypothesis of this study is whether or not participants who are exposed to misleading post-event information will have their eyewitness testimony influenced. Those participants who are tested using misleading questions will be more influenced than those participants who have non-misleading questions. Additionally, it is hypothesised that participants would be increasingly misled from information derived from that of a truck, opposed to that of a church.

Method

Participants:

Participants were Undergraduate Psychology and Counselling students from Swansea Metropolitan University who received course credits towards their degree for participating. Fifty participants were used (twenty-five females, twenty-five males). They were recruited voluntarily through the University's Experiment Management System (EMS). They were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the manipulated with questions (n = 25; fourteen females, eleven males); the non-manipulated with questions (n = 25; eleven females, fourteen males). This random assignment to contrasting conditions was accomplished by placing participant's names in a hat. Participants were tested with a questionnaire after being exposed to a short video of a car excursion along a rural road.

Design:

The study was an experimental laboratory-based method, which employed a between-measures design. The purpose was to investigate any hypothetical anomalies of accuracy within memory recall, between misleading questions and standard questions. This was tested with the use of two differing questionnaires, one which established the use of misleading questions and one which exclusively used standard non-misleading questions. The questions were identical on both questionnaires, excluding the misleading question used. As the study was a laboratory experiment, quantitative data was generated. The independent variable was the misleading post-event information, which was determined by a questionnaire. The dependent variable was the extent to which misled subjects incorporate the misleading information into their own eyewitness testimonies, which was measured by the memories of the participants given in the questionnaire. An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the results of the misled participants with the not-misled participants; this was employed to distinguish if the influence of leading questions had a significant effect on memory recall.

Materials:

A laboratory was required to conduct the experiment; the laboratory was a concealed isolated room with a computer monitor (20inch). A consent form was presented to all participants before they conducted the experiment (presented in Appendix A). A short three minute video clip of a car excursion along a rural road was employed and exposed on a computer monitor; the video clip demonstrated the car passing certain objects and buildings. The researcher collected data by distributing one of two questionnaires with ten questions to each participant. The questionnaires included two critical questions and eight insignificant questions. Both questionnaires had identical questions with the exception of the two, which are defined as critical. The critical questions proposed in the misled condition were "Did you see the red delivery truck?" and "Was the car travelling fast when it passed the church?" (presented in Appendix B) whilst the critical questions projected in the not-misled condition were "Were there any religious buildings?" and "Was there a red delivery truck?" (presented in Appendix C). When in fact, there was no red truck or church in the video clip. A red pen was given to each participant to finalise the questionnaire. Lastly, a debrief form was assigned to all participants, illustrating the purpose of the research and why they were deceived (presented in Appendix D).

Procedure:

Participants at Swansea Metropolitan University applied to participate in the experiment through the EMS; each participant was assigned to one of two conditions. Once the participants arrived at the laboratory, they read and signed a consent form, permitting adequate consent to participate in the study. The participants were informed that the intention of the study was memory recall of a car excursion, testing was carried out individually. All participants were exposed to an identical video clip of a car excursion on a computer monitor. Immediately after watching the video clip, all participants were supplied with an independent questionnaire associated to the car excursion, and were instructed to answer the questions provided by circling the appropriate answer. On completion of the experiment, all participants were thanked and thoroughly de-briefed.

Ethical Considerations:

All ethical considerations for this study conformed to the ethical guidelines provided by the British Psychological Society (BPS, 2010) (ethics approval form presented in Appendix E). Full written consent was obtained before the study commenced to guarantee the participants understood their rights within the study. They were likewise informed of their right to withdraw from the experiment at any time they desired. Deception was implicated in this study, as participants were informed that their participation involved memory recall of a car excursion alone. Due to this, participants received adequate verbal and written debriefing immediately after the experiment, which familiarised the participants with the purpose of the research including the aims and hypotheses. Additionally, the debrief clarified why deception was employed and provided them with a chance to withdraw their data. Humiliation was dealt with by applying numbers to each participant in preference to names, which eliminated any identifiable information, granting each participant with anonymity. Moreover, the consent forms were stored privately away from the predominant data and withheld within a secured container. The research was stored anonymously for an indefinite period. On completion of this study, any confidential data was destroyed.

Results

An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the results of the misled participants with the not-misled participants; this was employed to distinguish if the influence of leading questions had a significant effect on memory recall.

Fifty participants were used (twenty-five females, twenty-five males). They were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the manipulated with questions (n = 25; fourteen females, eleven males); the non-manipulated with questions (n = 25; eleven females, fourteen males).

On average, participants were increasingly influenced by the questions in the misleading condition; church (M = 1.36, SD = 0.50), truck (M = 1.28, SD = 0.46), than those participants in the not-misleading condition; church (M = 1.76, SD = 0.44), truck (M = 1.80, SD = 0.41).

This dissimilarity was statistically significant as 64% of the participants in the misled condition responded 'yes' to seeing a church, in comparison to the 28% of participants in the not-misled condition: t (48)=-3.050, p < .004, two-tailed.

In conjunction with this, a meaningful 72% of participants reported seeing a red truck in the misled condition, whilst 24% of participants in the not-misled condition reported seeing the red truck: t (48)=-4.236, p < .000, two-tailed.

These results suggest that post-event information does have an effect on memory recall. Specifically in this study, participants were increasingly misled from the information derived from that of the truck, opposed to that of the church. The terminology of misleading questions, examined immediately following the event has taken place, can influence the answer.

Discussion

This experiment used standard post-event misleading information and manipulated the participants through the use of misleading questions. This study replicated the design of Loftus' (1975) barn study, which identified that post-event information presented in question form produced the influence on an individual's eyewitness testimony. The post-event misleading information increased the participant's recall of misleading items (the truck and the church) which impaired their recall of the originally witnessed event. Therefore, the present study supports the hypothesis that misleading post-event information does influence an individual's eyewitness testimony.

Research into eyewitness testimony demonstrates that there are 3 main extraneous variables which may influence the studies outcome. This present study dealt with these 3 main extraneous variables. The first was participant variables, all individuals are dissimilar and as this research used 2 groups of people with different participants in each group, there may be individual differences between participants. These individual differences may bias the results if not controlled. This was conducted by randomly assigning participants to each group, which reduces the chances of individual differences. Situational variables were additionally controlled, certain aspects of a situation may make participants function better or worse which may confound the results. This was dealt by keeping all aspects of the situation consistent; making sure all participants conducted the study in the same situation. Lastly, experimenter variables were taken into consideration. Sometimes the researchers manner can influence participants, as can the way the instructions are given. If instructions are not clear, this may affect the way the participants would normally perform. This was overcome by the researcher acting in a friendly but neutral manner and making sure all participants had standardised instructions that were clear to understand.

This existing review lacks external validity, watching a video clip does not constitute real life and does not provide the individual with the same consequences, and hence a compliant reaction may be achieved more easily under experimental conditions. In a real life setting, there will be real consequences which may make the individual desire to appear more accurate. However, numerous amounts of work has been engineered into the influence of false information on eyewitness testimonies and found both supporting and opposing research appropriate for this study. This could be argued to be the case for the majority of laboratory based research, as the experimental situation is too synthetic and does not symbolise real life stimulus as a real event would. It is therefore genuinely problematic to conduct research on the accuracy of eyewitness testimonies; this demonstrates that the responses of the participants will never be the equal of those of real life witnesses. This has been shown to be the case by Foster et al. (1994) who desired to scrutinise the accuracy of eyewitness accounts in real life contexts and laboratory environments. Two groups of participants were presented with video footage of a bank robbery, one group learned that the robbery was genuine and the responses they gave would be used in a court trial, whilst the alternative group suspected it was simply stimulation. They distinguished that those participants who trusted that the robbery was authentic were able to more accurately recognise the robber than the other group. This investigation speculates that legitimate witnesses are more likely to operate better in recall tests than participants of a psychology study.

When the misleading post-event information was presented in the questions, participants incorporated this recent information into their initial memory. One clarification as to why participants may be misled is called the 'construction hypothesis'. When responding to a question which incorporates a church or a truck, the participant may 'visualise' or 'reconstruct' in their imagination the surroundings that they observed. Consequently, the participant may welcome the influence and introduce the feature into their visualisation whether or not it was in the primary witnessed memory. When the participant is later asked about the phenomenon, they are more inclined to 'see' the object that they themself have constructed. This is less likely to happen if the questions asked following the occurrence, are not misleading. This assumption shows a profoundly substantial consequence, if participants are supplied with genuine evidence that they had formerly not seen and that knowledge becomes part of their memory of the event, then in a similar way, it is feasible to introduce deceitful information into an individual's memory.

This theory supports Loftus and Palmer's (1974) study on car accidents. They exposed participants to a video of a car accident and pursued it with a questionnaire which incorporated questions about the recording. Some participants were asked 'How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?', whereas the additional participants were asked the same question with 'hit' substituted for 'smashed'. A week later participants retook the test, those questioned with the verb 'smashed' were more prone to comply to have seen broken glass which was not present in the video than the participants who were questioned with 'hit'. They believed that the participants had modified the collision towards a greater severity when the questionnaire employs the expression 'smashed', this may be on account of the researcher adding new misleading information that the cars did indeed 'smash' into one another. The participants will as a result reconstruct the accident in their memory that is more severe than it actually was. Therefore the severity of the accident has a positive relationship with the likelihood of the participants reporting the broken glass.

There is a theory of memory for complex visual experiences in which a practical mechanism plays an integral role. Figure 1 exposes this theory, which has three principal elements. The first two components involve acquisition processes and the third involves retrieval processes.

Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of the memorial processes.

Acquisition of original experience: When a somewhat complex event takes place, it is accepted that several fragments of that event is drawn out for action decisions and/or storage. During the incident, the spectator must decide on which information of the visual stimulus should be attended to. As our visual surroundings accommodate an eternal amount of information, the segment of knowledge that is actually noted is very small. The procedure that is concerned with determining which information should be attended to consists of an arrangement of decisions, each parallel to where the next eye fixation should be. According to Anderson and Bower (1973) when an individual is involved in an event, they organise and preserve wisdom about that event in the formation of statements that can be managed as a categorised graph format. In this illustration of memory process, experiences may arise as an accumulation of arguments which imitates precise notions and/or objects, with associations between the ideas representing labelled semantic relationships between selective objects.

Another theory about the representation of information is established in terms of decision techniques, appearances or 'memory images' that are related to the elementary event witnessed. Individuals may adopt more than one pattern of representation to accumulate information in whichever form that is most suitable to a specific situation (e.g., an individual may store information in terms of representations which can then be converted into mental images at the time of information retrieval (Winograd, 1972).

Acquisition of subsequent information: When an event is observed, there is very little support to accept that the represented event is in fact precise. Certain events and/or information that are acquired before or after the original event may amend the representation of the event. One truly effective way to achieve this is simply adding new information into the existing memory architecture and therefore reforming that original structure.

Retrieval processes: After both the original witnessed event and the first time questioned about it, the witness may be questioned a few times about the event (e.g., after being questioned by the police, a witness may have to answer questions to a lawyer before testifying in court). To answer these questions, the witnesses must 're-create' the event from the long-term memory to answer specific questions. Therefore, the image that may be created is based on both information from the original experienced event and new information received before and/or after the event. Information that is collected throughout a complex event appears to be combined into a general memory representation. Bartlett (1932) was one of the first researchers to dispute the way in which we represent experiences in our memory, he believed it is driven by our existing wisdom about certain objects, events and processes of that experience. Since Bartlett's work, there has been continuing curiosity into the influence of an original event due to new information. Rumelhart and Norman (1973) concluded that 'retrieval of an experience from memory is usually reconstructed which is heavily biased by the individuals general knowledge of the world'. Whereas, Tulving and Thomson (1973) regard 'remembering' as 'a joint product of information stored in the past and present in the immediate cognitive environment of the researcher'.

For Loftus and Palmer (1974) they believed that misleading information was incorporated into the actual memory of the original event. Morton et al. (1985) noted that memory is actually modified to conform to post-event information, resulting in reconstructive errors. New information destroys and/or overwrites actually stored memories. A later hypothesis came from Loftus and Loftus (1980) that post-event information over-writes and/or substitutes the genuine memory of the event. It is therefore argued that when an individual who has been misled by post-event information is questioned about a given event, the memory of that event may have been contaminated by later information received. That later information is then incorporated into the stored representation of the event.

There has been a broad amount of research into the characteristics of a witness and whether they make the individual more or less vulnerable to the influence of post-event information.

There is no clear significant evidence to speculate that males and females differ in overall ability to recall an event they have witnessed. However, Shapiro and Penrod (1986) conducted a meta-analysis and found that female witnesses are more inclined to make accurate identifications of criminals than males. On the other hand, it is argued that males and females take an interest and/or direct their attention to contrasting aspects of the event witnessed and will consequently remember distinctive details of the event (Powers et al. 1979). Overall, the influence of post-event information on males and females appears to be largely indistinguishable.

Linking back to the literature review, the age of the witness has continually been connected to the influence of post-event information, with numerous amounts of research demonstrating that children and the elderly comply considerably worse than younger and middle aged adults. Moreover, there is a relatively limited amount of research into whether intelligence is intertwined with eyewitness testimony accuracy. Despite this, Howells (1938) established a meaningful association between the accuracy to recall an event and intelligence. Subsequent studies however, have found no relation (Brown et al. 1977). The race of the witness has been extensively explored. Nevertheless, no persistent verdict to pose an overall distinction has been identified. Although, it is maintained that individuals are superior at identifying their own race or ethnic group than faces of alternative races or ethnic groups. To reinforce this, Meissner and Brigham (2001) implemented a meta-analysis to express that this conclusion is flourishing across more than twenty-five years of psychological research.

There is rarely published research which proposes that personality characteristics have a repercussion on an individual's eyewitness accuracy. Be that as it may, Hosch et al. (1984) proposed that individuals with a high self-monitoring personalities (individuals who modify their behaviour to what is deemed as socially acceptable) are more affected by post-event information than those who are low self-monitors. In conjunction with, Shapiro and Penrod (1986) disputed that individuals high in chronic trait anxiety (individuals with a general attitude of apprehension) made fewer mistakes when selecting a criminal after witnessing a crime than individuals low in chronic trait anxiety. Despite the contrary, inconsiderable research has been directed at the representation of personality in eyewitness testimony. In addition to this, there is by no means a hearty theory which relates personality to eyewitness testimony.

There are various distinctive characteristics of the event that may influence the precision of eyewitness testimony. If the individual has witnessed a crime and has observed the criminal it is contemplated that there are a number of determinants that influence the accuracy of the identification of that criminal, such as the amount of time the criminal is in sight, the lighting conditions, whether the criminal wears a disguise (i.e. a mask), the distinctiveness of the criminals appearance, the presence or absence of a weapon and together with, the timing of comprehension that the individual is witnessing a crime.

Overall, the amount of time that the criminals face is in view is acknowledged to not be symbolic in the accuracy of an individual's eyewitness identification, in comparison to the amount of attention given by the witness. Leippe et al. (1978) exposed unsuspected participants to a staged thief of a package. Half the participants were led to believe that the item in the package was of considerable value whist the alternative half were led to believe that the item in the package was trivial. In addition to, some participants were informed of the value of the item before the thief and some only learned the value of the item after the thief had fled. All participants had the same opportunity and extent of time to see the thief. They acclaimed that participants who knew the value of the item beforehand were notably more accurate at identifying the criminal than the other group. The majority of observers of a crime do not tend to comprehend that they have witnessed a crime until after the incident has materialised. The individuals may have acquired a significant amount of time to notice the criminal, yet had little justification to attend vigorously.

One instrument that can notify the eyewitness that the situation they are in is a crime is the presence of a weapon. Nevertheless, it has been proven that when an individual grasp that they are an eyewitness to a crime through the presence of a weapon, it may not make the individual an admirable eyewitness. A meta-analysis of studies that incorporate the presence of a weapon, has verified that the presence of the weapon impairs the accuracy of the identification of the criminal and further aspects of the event (Steblay, 1992). This may be a consequence of the eyewitness being drawn away from auxiliary aspects, as all of their attention is focusing on the weapon. To support this, Loftus et al. (1987) monitored the eyewitness's eye movements and revealed that the weapon draws the witness's visual attention away from alternative aspects.

Light et al. (1979) denoted that distinctive faces are accurately recognised to a greater extent than non-distinctive faces. Likewise, Fleishman et al. (1976) determined that faces that are exceptionally attractive or severely unattractive are relatively easier to remember than average attractiveness. Despite this, it can be argued what aspects make a face distinctive or attractive, as all individuals have contrasting preferences. According to Cutler et al. (1988) very simple disguises, even as miner as coving one's hair can result in a noticeable influence of the eyewitnesses amount.

It is concluded that stress may affect the accuracy of an individual's memory of an event. It has been suggested that when stress is very low, remembrance is impaired; recall is regarded to become enhanced when the level of stress is moderate. Likewise as stress being low, recall accuracy decreases when stress is very high. Peters (1988) defends this by using a nurse's clinic study. The participants entered a room for an injection where a nurse and a researcher were waiting. Afterwards the participant was instructed to identify both the researcher and the nurse. It was established that participants were considerably more desirable at identifying the researcher correctly over the nurse; this may be due to the nurse being associated with high level of stress generated by receiving an injection.

A 'warning' procedure has been engineered to see whether misleading post-event information causes the original information to be lost from memory. The warning procedure typically has three conditions: a control condition, a misled condition, and a misled/warned condition. The control condition and the misled condition are frequently the same as the original test procedure. The misled/warned condition is identical to the misled condition apart from the participants being warned of misleading information ahead of the assessment, that a portion of (unspecified) details in the post-event information may have been inaccurate. It is considered that this warning may by some means allow participants to retrieve connections to the original information. Greene et al. (1982) postulated that achievement was refined in the misled/warned conditions than for solely misled conditions, this signifies that participants who could commemorate the original information was higher in the former condition and the warning allowed part of the misled/warned participants to recover the initial information that was rendered inaccessible by the misleading post-event information.

The Cognitive Interview is a method of interviewing, in which an eyewitness reports what they remember from an occurrence. The cognitive interview is deemed to embellish the retrieval of information and make eyewitness testimonies more systematic. Consequently, it is imperative that when the police question eyewitnesses, that they adopt the cognitive interview to diminish any opportunity of post-event information influencing the original event. It implicates 4 fundamental retrieval processes; Context reinstatement, where the eyewitness must recall the context of the event (including the scene, weather etc.). Report all; state all details regardless of perceived relevance. Recall the event from a changed perspective (i.e. try to describe the event from several relevant perspectives) and a change order technique (recall the event in a different order, e.g., backwards). This system is approved to provide the witness with cues to jog their memory of any substantial details.

There is research to support the effectiveness of the cognitive interview. Geiselman et al. (1985) showed participants a video of a crime and later interviewed them using one of three interview techniques; a standard police interview, the cognitive interview or an interview under hypnosis. Participants interviewed with the cognitive interview recalled more unmistakable details about the crime than the participants in the other 2 groups. Moreover, Fisher et al. (1990) has justified that the cognitive interview is effective in real police settings in Miami. They trained detectives to use the cognitive interview technique on genuine crime witnesses and established that its use significantly broadened the magnitude of knowledge recollected. Together with, Milne and Bull (2003) acknowledged that all 4 of the cognitive interview procedures used exclusively generated more desirable recall from witnesses than standard interview techniques. On the other hand, they found that the most effective combination appeared to be the use of 'Context reinstatement' and 'Report all' procedures.

Be that as it may, the cognitive interview has not been very favourable when questioning young children. Geiselman et al. (1985) reviewed a number of studies and concluded that children under the age of six years old reported events somewhat less precisely in response to the cognitive interview techniques. This may be due to them finding the instructions difficult to apprehend. The technique is perceived as productive for children aged eight years upwards. In spite of that, the cognitive interview has been criticised for being an interview procedure that elicits more information overall than alternative procedures. Koehnken et al. (1999) claims that witnesses that were questioned using the cognitive interview recalled more erroneous information than those who were questioned using just standard questioning.

Research has in the same way demonstrated that memory recall can be enriched if recall takes place in the corresponding location as learning. This is due to contextual cues being present. Contextual cues are elements in the surrounding terrain that are present at a time of learning; these are additionally encoded along with the knowledge being learnt. It has been proposed that if the related items that are encoded, are present when recalling, they can jog the individual's memory for the information that was fundamentally learnt. This theory has been pursued by Godden and Baddeley (1975). Deep sea divers learnt and recalled words both underwater and on land. It was accepted that the divers' recall was the utmost accurate when recalling took place in the identical environment as learning (e.g., words learnt underwater were recalled best when underwater). This evidence however, has been criticised for inadequate external validity, in real life it is highly extraordinary to learn a list of words for the sake of it, for all one knows if a real life exercise was employed (e.g., an exam) memory may not be impaired in the equivalent way by the context. Therefore, it may essential for an eyewitness of an event to recall what occurred at the event when first questioned by the police.

If the study was reconstructed, a number of alternative features could make the results more significant. The study design would be exchanged to a two-part study, participants would come and participate as before, however all participants would need to come back a week later to participate again. In the first fragment of the study, the participants would watch a video clip followed by a questionnaire with either misleading or non-misleading questions. Then a week later, all participants would be administrated with an identical questionnaire including the questions about the misleading information. Loftus (1975) believed that participants may not be influenced immediately after an event at all times, but what if the same questions were asked to the participants some time later? She found that participants reflect themselves and ask themselves questions such as "I remember something about a red truck, so I guess I must have seen one." If this is the case, then merely asking about a non-existent object could increase the tendency to report that non-existent object at some time later, therefore influencing the individual's original eyewitness account.

Previously mentioned, this present work extends the notions that original memories of an event can be influenced by new information that is received after the event. In this experiment, the new information was introduced via misleading questions, a technique which is effective in introducing information without calling attention to it. The experimental manipulation of conjoining new information into the event has been proven a beneficial technique for investigating the influence of post-event information on an individual's eyewitness testimony. This colossal amount of research into the influence of eyewitness testimony helps demonstrate to the court, that considerable amounts of reliability should not be placed on eyewitness' accounts; this will help prevent frequent errors occurring in the justice system. Eyewitness testimony is regularly employed as solid evidence in the courts; Baddeley (1997) found that 74% of suspects were convicted across three-hundred disconnected cases where eyewitnesses had identified them, providing the only evidence against them. If post-event information was better understood, then eyewitness testimony would not be considered as one of the most reliable sources of evidence, alternatively it would be treated with caution and employed exclusively as additional evidence. Loftus states that misleading post-event information merely obscures the precise original information in memory; she likewise concludes that over time the consequences of misleading information, becomes more conspicuous.