Eyewitness Testimony

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elies on stereotypes, e.g. it would not be expected that a little old women could commit a crime wearing a suit, so it might be re-called that it was a man rather then a women.

In reference to Siegler (1998), it seems many people understand human memory to be similar to that of a series of photographs, or a movie of our experiences. If this statement were correct, eyewitness testimony would be very reliable, as the witness would simply recount what happened. This understanding however is not the case; in fact, human memory at any age is not close to being this complete or accurate. Research has found that both adults and children often fail to remember what they saw, often have memories of events that never happened and often combine separate experiences into a single memory (Siegler, 1998). The study of human memory understandably incorporates many components. One of these components is the three phases of memory. The first of these phases is titled the encoding phase, which refers to an individual's acquirement of information; in the case of an eyewitness this is the phase when they witness the crime. The second phase is titled the storage phase whereby encoded information is stored in the memory for later use; research has found some eyewitnesses memory storage is very susceptible to 'suggestibility', meaning they are greatly influenced by experiences that occur after the original event but before the time of retrieval. The third phase is titled the retrieval stage where an individual recalls or recognises information from a memory, this would be the phase of an eyewitness giving their testimony (Galotti, 1994, Haberlandt, 1994 & Siegler, 1998)

After summarising the three phases of memory we can now examine Wells & Olsen's (2003) first component of determining the reliability/unreliability of an eyewitness testimony, the characteristics of the witness. Psychological research into eyewitness testimony focusing on the characteris...