Effects Of Unconscious Transference On Eyewitness Recall

Unconscious transference has been found to affect eyewitness recall. Unconscious transference refers to the misidentification of an innocent person as the perpetrator due to seeing them in another context e.g before or when the event occurred.

This occurs because of the way our brain retrieves information. In order to recall an event we have to reconstruct information using nerve pathways that were associated together during the event. Other information, such as knowledge prior and after the event may integrate into this reconstruction and so what is assumed to be the correct recall of the event may have been altered. (Read et al.)

Loftus (1976, in 2 Law & Psychol. Rev 1976) presented 50 students pictures of a offender and bystanders with a corresponding story. Three days later they asked the participants to make a selection from a line-up of the perpetrator.

60% of participants chose the bystander when that picture was included instead. The participant’s memory of all faces became integrated and so they were unable to tell the bystander from the perpetrator when recalling.

Therefore positive identification in eyewitness testimonies could be a case of an incorrect integration of memory and not a fully accurate account of the events that occurred. As the witnesses are unaware of this transference this could lead them to be very confident in their recall and identification of the culprit, when in fact they are wrong. This has major implications in law and to the level of which eyewitness accounts can be