Study of eyewitness testimony - Loftus and Palmer experiment 1 - Essay Example

Study of eyewitness testimony- Loftus & Palmer experiment Eyewitness testimony refers to information relayed by an individual present during the occurrence of an incident. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as eyewitness memory, which encompasses the storage and retrieval of information from the long term memory (LTM) by an individual who directly witnessed an event. Since time immemorial, the judicial system relied on eyewitness testimonies as credible grounds to convict alleged criminals.

This resulted in the wrongful conviction of many innocent people, and brought into question the integrity and validity of eyewitness testimonies (Rolls, 2013). Loftus and Palmer (1974) sought to explore the authenticity of eyewitness memory by examining the impact of misleading information on the recall of information by an eyewitness. Their experiment comprised of forty five participants divided into six groups and shown seven films portraying different accident scenes. After which, the experimenters asked them to describe the different scenes.

In addition, one group received a neutral question while the remaining five groups received a question laden with emotion evoking verbs, which described the speed at which the vehicles hit each other. The mean speed from the groups given questions with emotion-evoking verbs was higher compared to the groups given questions with neutral verbs (Cardwell & Flanagan, 2005). Loftus and Palmer concluded from their experiment that misleading information (emotion-evoking verbs) affected the accuracy of recalled information given by a witness (Banyard & Flanagan, 2013).

A major limitation of this study centered on replication. Other researchers interested in replicating the study were unable to do so. In addition, the study lacked external validity. Inferences deduced from the study cannot be generalized to real life situations. Other factors such as heightened emotions and accelerated occurrence of events affect the storage and retrieval of an eyewitnesss information (Albon, 2007).References Albon, A. (2007). Introducing Psychology Through Research. New York: McGraw-Hill International.

Banyard, P., & Flanagan, C. (2013). OCR Psychology: AS Core Studies and Psychological Investigations. New York: Psychology Press.Cardwell, M., & Flanagan, C. (2005). Psychology AS. New York: Nelson Thornes.Rolls, G. (2013). Classic Case Studies in Psychology. New York: Routledge.