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Eyewitness Testimonies

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Eyewitness testimonies has contributed tremendously towards law enforcement and crime, helping to place the accused behind bars for the crimes they have committed. Although it has helped to place a huge number of these accused behind bars, eyewitness testimony has been proven to be rather inaccurate and unreliable (Brigham, Maass, Snyder, & Spaulding, 1982). Through the advancement of technology, DNA evidence has proven that some of these individuals have been wrongfully incarcerated. DNA evidence may be an effective measure, but it would only help to solve a minimal number of cases when DNA samples present. At times, DNA evidence might only help to prove that the individual is present at the crime scene. With that being said, eyewitness testimony …show more content…

In Godden and Baddeley’s experiment (1975), the encoding specificity hypothesis was being tested by using deep sea divers. Participants were being split into two groups where they were made to memorise spoken words in two different environments, on land and under water. Half of the participants from each group later switched locations for retrieval. Results from the experiments have shown that the participants that encoded and retrieved information of the spoken words in the same environmental context performed better as compared to the other participants which did otherwise – encoding and retrieving information in different environmental context. There was also no significant difference between Dry-Dry and Wet-Wet, nor between Dry-Wet and Wet-Dry conditions. From this experiment it seems that environmental cues are crucial in aiding the improvement of the accuracy and reliability of eyewitness testimony. The table and graph below illustrates the results reflecting Godden and Baddeley (1975) experiment on encoding specificity and the effect of environmental context on

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