A growing body of research now supports this speculation, indicating that mistaken eyewitness identification is responsible for more convictions of the innocent than all other factors combined.
[8] When participants were given a basic memory test from an array of photos or a lineup, they struggled to accurately identify the images and had low recognition.
[15] Perception may affect the immediate encoding of these unreliable notions due to prejudices, which can influence the speed of processing and classification of racially ambiguous targets.
For example, if one is held at gunpoint by two individuals, one of whom is a man and the other is a woman wearing a hat, the victim may quickly fall back on the belief that men are more likely to be aggressors.
Another way encoding a memory can be affected is when the person involved in a traumatic event experiences dissociation; mentally removing themselves from the situation, which may serve as a coping mechanism.
Lastly, trauma may induce a flashbulb effect; the witness believes they vividly remember significant details of a salient event, although accuracy must be determined of such memories .
Mood congruency may affect a witnesses ability to recall a highly stressful crime, if conditions of encoding and retrieval are different.
Implicit processing takes place during the event, in which the witness encodes the general features of innocent bystanders, creating a sense of familiarity.
A study done by Daisuke, Matsui, & Yuji showed that using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm has demonstrated that false memory can be produced by the morphological characteristics of a list.
This suggests the sequential lineup fosters a more conservative shift in criterion to make a selection rather than an increased ability to pick the true perpetrator.
It must be considered that memories are normally vulnerable to multiple influences and prone to distortions and deceptions: "they are never constant and never result in fully accurate representations [and] these changes occur without us being aware of them.
University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett analyzed trial materials for 161 DNA exonerated individuals and found that in 57 percent of those cases, it was possible to determine that, in the initial (uncontaminated) memory test, the eyewitnesses were, at best, uncertain.
During situations in which information processing conditions are less than optimal (e.g. the perpetrator is disguised or duration of exposure is brief) witnesses' performance during identification decreases and they are less confident in their decision.
[64] Asking eyewitnesses to repeatedly retrieve information in multiple interviews may enhance memory because the event is being rehearsed many times or, as in many cases, increase suggestibility.
[64] In addition, repeating questions could make the witness feel pressured to change his or her answer or elaborate on an already-given response with fabricated details.
[64] Contextual reinstatement is a common technique used to help eyewitnesses remember details about a specific environment—reviewing the initial environment in which the original information was encoded.
Research has demonstrated that pairing faces of suspects or words with contextual cues at the scene of the crime will enhance performance on recognition tasks.
Researchers have begun to implement procedures for reinstating the context surrounding a specific event in an attempt to improve identification accuracy.
[24] Poorer memory performance in young kids was shown when youth of different ages were asked to recall a doctor's visit.
[3][4][5] Individuals with intellectual disabilities are at a higher risk for sexual abuse and exploitation because they are often dependent on others and uneducated or physically incompetent in ways of self-protection.
However, the control group were better at recognizing when a target was present in a lineup, leading to the determination that people with intellectual disabilities are more suggestible and likely to confabulate.
In the past, eidetikers were believed to have extremely accurate recall for visual displays, but modern research findings might reveal a different story.
[104] However, a lot of research investigating environmental sound and memory recall is conducted in a laboratory setting and so has limited ecological validity and generalizability.
One proposed explanation for why accents can negatively affect the recall of visual information and eyewitness memory draws from Wickens' (2002; 2008) multiple resource theory.
[131] It has been suggested that blind individuals have an enhanced ability to hear and recall auditory information in order to compensate for a lack of vision.
This suggests that in blind individuals' brains, a reorganization of what are normally visual areas has occurred in order for them to process non-visual input.
Many researchers would suggest that this furthers the case for children (aged 11–13) to be thought of as equally capable of proving potentially helpful earwitness accounts within court settings.
Despite Jennifer's strong intent to study her rapist's features during the traumatic event for the purpose of identifying him afterward, she fell victim to encoding limitations at the time of the assault.
Jennifer undoubtedly experienced a great degree of stress on the night of her assault with a knife pressed to her neck and a feeling of absolute powerlessness.
[140] As a result, the authorities viewed Jennifer as the ideal eyewitness, one who was motivated to remember the face of her assailant during the event and subsequently confident in her identification of the target.