Reasons For Eyewitness Testimony

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Memory is the mental capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information. Through memories we carry carried knowledge we have gained from our skills, our past, our experiences, and the shared knowledge we have developed informally and formally through our lives. Through memories, we grow our personal sense of identity and our sense of our place within the shared knowledge and shared life of our communities.

Eyewitness testimony is a legal term. It refers to an account given by people of an event they have witnessed. Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory. Jury’s tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable source of information. However, research into this area has found that eyewitness testimony can be affected by many psychological factors.

It is important to remember that humans are always shaped by influences and different perspectives. If we as humans are changed by this, then surely our memories will also change over time. People from the same event have similar memories and experiences, whilst sharing memories the story will change. One can …show more content…

This, however, cannot be done with every piece of information we acquire since it is not humanly possible. Memory therefore proves to be a untrustworthy way of knowing that can only be trusted in very specific cases like the ones pointed out previously. Historians always try to get the most unbiased and true information possible in order for them to then share their knowledge, but this is only viable to a certain limited point. A solution to this everlasting limitation is receiving information from as many sources as possible and then coming out with one’s own conclusions. Doing so might not conserve the truth in historical information, but it is the closest we can get to acquiring knowledge through the use of

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