Ambiguous crimes and inattentional blindness: the science of eyewitness memory
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How reliable is eyewitness memory in the justice system?
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You are at a bus stop. A young girl is dropped off not long after you're there. And minutes later, an older woman comes by and gives the girl a bar of chocolate. And then they walk off holding hands. Did you just witness a crime? The unsettling answer is you might not be able to tell.
With kidnapping, I think, you know, we get the audience to think about it. When they hear kidnapping, they probably think, stranger comes up to child, child makes a fuss, kicks and screams, kidnapper pulls them into their van, drives off. But that mental representation we have might be very different to how kidnapping actually occurs.
And if you didn't recognize it as anything out of the usual at the time, how much of it will you be able to remember days, months, even years later?
Memory decays very rapidly. So within the first even hour that we've experienced something, we will forget about 60% of details of what we've witnessed.
On All in the Mind from ABC Radio National, I'm Sana Khadar, and this is part three of our special series, Forensic. It's all about the psychological tools used to crack crimes, what works, what doesn't, and the surprising ways things can go wrong. Today, eyewitness memory. All in the Mind's senior producer James Bullen is here. Hi, James.
Hi, Sana.
So how often is eyewitness memory used in cases?
It's used very frequently in Australia. It's a really persuasive form of evidence for courts, juries, justice systems. So if an eyewitness testimony is available, chances are that it will be called upon in a court and it will be used. Now, I spoke to Dr. Celine Van Gold, who we also had on the last episode of the show, talking about false confessions. She's an associate professor at the University of Sydney.
DNA evidence, fingerprint evidence, any other type of bodily fluids. indicates that a person might have been there, but not that they committed a crime necessarily, but all an eyewitness does that. And there's also a lot of crimes like domestic violence or any type of other crime where often the only evidence that's there is somebody's memory, is the victim or the witness. So for that reason, before it even goes to court, there is a lot of value in eyewitness memory. And how much weight is put on this kind of testimony?
Celine says a huge amount of weight is put on eyewitness testimony in court systems.
What is inattentional blindness and how does it affect eyewitness accounts?
When there is a person sitting there, tears in her eyes, saying, like, I saw this with my own eyes, I'm 100% certain that's the person that murdered the other one, it has a very emotive and a strong impact on jury members and on judges. Jury research has also shown that it is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that you can provide within a jury trial.
Okay, so it sounds like the stakes around eyewitness memory are really high. But Celine Van Gold also mentioned that there are, you know, shortcomings here. So what does that mean?
That's where we're going to go next.
We've got various factors that will influence how accurately we can recall a crime. And that's, for example, our age will have an influence. So a child will recall something that they've witnessed completely different than an adult will. But also, for example, if we are paying attention or how stressed that we are at the time that we are recalling something. And these are factors that will impact our memory at the time that we are encoding what is happening to us.
Encoding is the first step in how we remember. The steps of memory go encoding, storage, then retrieval. But let's focus on step two, storage.
So this is when we transfer what we're seeing into our memory to be stored and then recalled at a later point in time.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How reliable is eyewitness memory in the justice system?
0:00–3:14
2
What is inattentional blindness and how does it affect eyewitness accounts?
3:14–7:10
3
What factors influence the accuracy of eyewitness testimony?
7:10–11:19
4
How does memory decay impact eyewitness recollections over time?
11:19–12:52
5
What are the implications of ambiguous crimes on eyewitness testimonies?
12:52–16:52
6
How does attention affect what witnesses remember during a crime?
16:52–21:59
7
What does research say about people's ability to notice crimes?
21:59–26:18
8
How can understanding eyewitness memory improve the justice system?
26:18–29:36