For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017 - 38

At encoding, the witness may get only a partial view or actually 'see' an incorrect detail. This
is best shown by an experiment conducted more
than 100 years ago by the great researcher Hugo
Munsterberg:

one, a coffee-coloured jacket, shirt
sleeves, and similar costumes were
invented for him. He wore in reality
white trousers and a black jacket with a
large red necktie.3

[There was] a meeting of a scientific
association, made up of jurists, psychologists, and physicians... Suddenly, in
the midst of the scholarly meeting, the
doors open, a clown in highly coloured
costume rushes in in mad excitement,
and a negro with a revolver in hand
follows him. In the middle of the hall
first the one, then the other, shouts
wild phrases; then the one falls to the
ground, the other jumps on him; then a
shot, and suddenly both are out of the
room. The whole affair took less than
twenty seconds. All were completely
taken by surprise...It seemed most natural that the President should beg the
members to write down individually an
exact report, inasmuch as he felt sure
that the matter would come before
the courts.

If you need more convincing, take the "selective attention" test.
The potential for change in memory continues.
During retention, the memory may fragment or
be changed by new information, a process that
may recur during retrieval. Here, the most compelling illustration comes from an experiment by
Elizabeth Loftus. Subjects were shown a video of a
car accident, and then asked to estimate the speed
of the vehicles. But rather than a neutral question
of "what speed were the cars going at" the viewers were asked how fast the cars were going when
they "contacted," "hit," "bumped," "collided" or
"smashed." The more intense the verb, the higher
the speed estimate, see Figure 1.
What came next was worse. In a related experiment, witnesses were shown an accident video
and again asked to estimate speeds using differing
verbs to describe the contact. One week later, those
who viewed the video were asked whether there
was any broken glass [when in fact there was none].
The more intense the verb, the greater number
who 'remembered' broken glass. See Figure 2.
The questions as worded changed or 'grew'
the memories.4
One last lesson from the eyewitness cases bears
study - the deleterious effect of time in eroding
detail memory. People remember the 'gist' of an
event - being robbed or assaulted, or seeing a horrific crash - but the memory of details degrades
rapidly, often within a day. And degradation continues over time.5
What are the lessons? Interview as close to the
event as possible and understand the limited reliability of interviews conducted far after the event;
avoid words that may contaminate memory by
suggesting an image or behavior; and learn and
deploy alternative techniques such as cognitive
interviewing. This process has been described as
deploying several techniques:

Of the forty reports handed in, there
was only one whose omissions were
calculated as amounting to less than
twenty per cent of the characteristic
acts; fourteen had twenty to forty percent of the facts omitted; twelve omitted forty to fifty percent, and thirteen
still more than fifty percent. But besides
the omissions, there were only six
among the forty which did not contain
positively wrong statements; in twenty-four papers up to ten percent, of the
statements were free inventions, and in
ten answers - that is, in one-fourth of
the papers, - more than ten percent of
the statements were absolutely false, in
spite of the fact that they all came from
scientifically trained observers. Only
four persons, for instance, among forty
noticed that the negro had nothing on
his head; the others gave him a derby,
or a high hat, and so on. In addition to
this, a red suit, a brown one, a striped

For The Defense | Vol. 2, Issue 2

The interviewer tries to mentally reinstate
the environmental and personal context
of the crime for the witnesses, perhaps by

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017