Barrios, 1 Ashanty Barrios 11/12/13 English 106 A.

Halliday False Memory Reconstruction And Its Effects On Eyewitness Testimony Todays court system heavily relies on eyewitness testimony to prosecute a person. The purpose of having an eyewitness is to provide us with some kind of evidence, in most cases, offer a lead suspect in some of the most serious crimes out there such as arson, robbery, homicides and sexual assaults. A key component of an eyewitness testimony, however, is reliance on a persons memory. It is a controversial topic that has be subjected to many experiments and questions pertaining to just how reliable this kind of evidence may be. In Charles Brainerds article about the science of false memory, he applies some of Elizabeths Loftuss (a pioneer in the study of false memory reconstruction) methods of examination to explain the advantages and disadvantages of using eyewitness testimony in the court of law. Several studies have shown that 57% of the time, witnesses will falsely identify a suspect based solely on the information and suggestions given to them by the investigators and police officers. This mostly occurs when witnesses are exposed to several pictures of innocent people that have the same characteristics as the suspect. Quite often, forensic psychologists will deliberately do this to test out how accurately the witness can testify and if they are even eligible to testify as an eyewitness (Brainerd 261). One way they do this is having a suspects face appear multiple times in a mug book, which is a collection of pictures of ex convicts, innocent people, and any available

Barrios 2 suspects. The reappearance of the suspects face in the mug book is to test their attention. Once they can identify a single person or photographs of a single person as the culprit, it is called a show-up (Brainerd 263). This is one of the most common procedures that must occur before testifying as an eyewitness. Not only does it attempt to eliminate witnesses incapable of testifying, but it also eliminates error from choosing the wrong suspect and falsely accusing someone that is innocent. Brainerd believes that it is very simple to distort peoples memories into favoring one suspect or another. Not only this, but he also believes people can falsely identify an individual simply to comply with social norms. For example, when several individuals are lined up and the witness is then asked to pick who the suspect was, more often than not, they will choose a suspect without actually recognizing anyone. This is usually done just so that they chose someone and dont appear to be lying. The pressure that is applied to them causes them to become nervous and therefore comply with the instructions given to them about picking someone. Simply the choice of words used by the investigators will influence their decisions. By saying that they need to pick who the suspect is implies that one of the people amongst the crowd is in fact a suspect, and to not choose a person would make them seem like they do not really know who the suspect is. Now let us take memory distortion, for example. For the most part, which is normal as a matter of fact, people will claim to have verbatim episodic memories of the incident. This means they can recall the event exactly as it occurred and when asked, can clearly recite small details about the incident. This phenomena is known as recollection or remember phenomenology (Brainerd 265). What frequently tends to happen is that the witnesses will have cues that will trigger some kind of memory of the incident. This is where

Barrios, 3 distortion can come into play. If the actual culprit was tall, had dark hair, and wore a dark hoodie, when the witness is shown several pictures of people and one of them as at least two of the following attributes, more than likely they will choose that person as their suspect. This is due to familiarity, or know phenomenology (Brainerd 265). The witness is somewhat familiar with what the suspect looks like and therefore will choose that person because their memory has been distorted. Another key point to mention is how easily suggestions may alter the way a person perceives a situation. Simply by repeatedly asking, how did suspect one do this? or when suspect one went here, what did they do? they are subconsciously engraving in the witnesss memory that, without a doubt, suspect one is the culprit. With this, they can create vivid, but false memories of what may have occurred based solely on the information given to them by officials. As my child psych professor states; children are more vulnerable to this form of questioning because they are complying to the higher authority. They feel that they will get in trouble if they dont answer their questions and therefore will begin to believe an event actually occurred when it really didnt (Wachs 2013). One also has to take into account the mental and physical state of the witness at the time the incident occurred. As Brainerd mentions in his article, intoxication reduces attentiveness and stresswould be expected to impair the consolidation of verbatim traces of those experiences (269). As one can see, there are many factors that can alter ones memory. With the many studies done on memory and its reconstruction, Brainerd believes that an eyewitness testimony does not help the situation at hand. It may actually lead to innocent individuals being locked away all because of one individual. His article follows

Barrios 4 the Swales CARS model in which it establishes what is the topic of controversy and what is the discourse community he is analyzing (which would be the eyewitnesses). However, Brainerd does not mention his current research, but more so mentions his overall work, so in this sense it does not follow the Swales CARS model. While his methods are highly supported by other scholars in the field, some of his claims can be easily discredited. Even though eyewitness testimony is not statistically significant per say, in some cases such as those where no evidence is present, it may be the only lead to solving a case. He comes off as very passionate about the methods he uses to distort memory also the work he does in analyzing the validity of an eyewitnesss testimony. His writing style is scholarly, yet it uses common language that most people would understand and includes explanations for the specific terms used in this kind of study. At this point, it is safe to question the methods of our adversary system thus continuing the debate of whether or not eyewitness testimony is a valid piece of evidence.

Barrios, 5 Annotated Bibliography Brainerd, Charles, and Valerie Reyna. False Memory in Criminal Investigation. Science of False Memory (2005): 261-289. Web. 7 Nov 2013 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/purdue/docDetail.action?docID=10103601&p00=false% 20memory Wachs, Theodore. Information Processing and Memory Lecture. Purdue University. Smith Hall, West Lafayette, IN. 22 October 2013.