Loss of Memory through Misleading Post-Events Imposed on an Eyewitness - Essay Example

Loss of Memory through Misleading Post-Events Imposed on an Eyewitness Loss of Memory through Misleading Post-Events Imposed on an Eyewitness Introduction The human memory has over 14 billion cells. Scientifically, it is alluded that this capacity allows man to store and comprehend anything which comes across his mind. To the contrary, cases of memory losses have been reported. Many psychologists have been puzzled severally and researches have been and are still being conducted to find out why the loss of memory occurs to an eyewitness after exposure to post events (Wright and Livingstone 2002). The role of memory in witnessing is important. This is because the information received is relied upon to make a judgment on a suspect. For this reason, the information extracted from the eyewitness needs to be absolutely accurate. Reproducibility of the information needs to portray consistency. This paper examines the impacts of post events on the mind of an eyewitness. How does a Post Event Impair the Eyewitness Memory? Naturally, when a crime scene occurs, all the witnesses available are required to immediately give an account of what had transpired. This came with a realization that upon delay, post events can alter the fine details making the information received inaccurate. There are a number of reasons which have been identified to influence this distortion. Imagination has been identified to be in the front (Libby 2003). A research done on some young children about their childhood happenings, it was noted that introduction of imaginative aspects changed the accuracy of the information they were giving. The children got immersed into the strengths of imagination and it appeared their mind was driven away by that force. Interestingly the imaginations accentuate the inaccurate information to appear to be very real (McNally, Lasko, Clancy, Maklin, Pitman and Orr 2004). How this really happens is still a big area of research though “hearing” is associated with it. Take for example, in case of a robbery action; if you hear the sound of a gun cocking, your mind registers that effect. Probability of saying that what you have seen is a gun after is very high. Remember you did not see the gun but you just heard. Through your imagination later affect the robbery, you are convinced that you saw and not heard. This imagination has impaired the original information. It has assumed that you saw and not hearing. Probably what you heard was a sound of a toy gun, or something else but what is now permanently stored in your brain is that you saw. The post event of imagination has ruined the original fact. It would be had for the investigators to get to the bottom of the matter. The mind is unique in a way that it has the characteristic of prioritizing what it perceives at the moment. This directly translates to why it is very easy to implant new information to an eyewitness. Through suggestive techniques, the mind of any eyewitness may be altered. A research showed that misleading information suggested several times replaces the original memory. A person was chosen randomly and told that at the age of six, he was hospitalized on account of low blood sugar. This suggestion did not at first receive clarity but several weeks down the line, this person developed clarity of what happened and the level of confidence had intensified (Ost, Foster, Costall and Bull 2005). Though nothing like this ever happened, the mind has adopted this implantation false memory. It is severally said that “a lie told a number of times become the truth”. People generally adopt it as the truth. Despite the Greek seeing that a spider had eight legs, they believed it had six because they were told by their scientist so. This is an amazing element of the human memory to be affected by what is happening at the moment (Okado and Stark 2005). A famous series movie which can even be watched online “The Vampire Diaries” shows the capability of playing around with the mind. The vampires in that movie have the ability to erase the memory of a common man through a process they refer as “compelling”. The compelling is just a suggestive method. The original vampires in the movie also have the capability of both erasing and implanting a new thinking like “you are now my friend”. Though the movie is not a scientific documentary, it helps in elaborating the impact of suggestive methods on the memory of a person. A vampire sucks and kills a person and the witness who saw that is compelled to forget that episode. It is just amazing and this is known as familial-informant-false-narrative-procedure (Lindsay, Hagen, Read, Wade and Garry 2004). Also included in this category are guided dream interpretations which have made people believe that certain things happened yet in real sense they did not happen (Loftus 2003). According to Loftus, even by a mere act of doctoring photographs, it is possible to play around with the memory of a witness. This has even made it difficult as to whether photographs should be adopted as evidence in the judicial system or not. With increased computer technology, it is possible to change a photo to suit any situation and this brings the question of how far can a human memory be interfered with these happenings. It is true that the mind is made up of very many cells. This does not guarantee that it can recall everything which comes its way. It collects a lot in a single day and like an updating system of a computer, it installs new features as it is dropping the old one. The aspect of remembering is time constrained. Giving clues to retrieve the memory is bringing new ideas in the memory process (Harpar and Garry 2000). The brain should not be motivated to remember. Cases of people being promised of big chunks of money if only they remember a certain episode has resulted to creativity of similar happenings instead of recalling the actual thing. Association of a thing which crosses the mind of the person under test is potential enough to alter the truth of the matter. Instead of remembering what actually happened, a person who is being given clues remembers what he “thinks” he saw and not what he really saw. The thinking may be attributed to a movie or something similar to what is being purported to have happened. This is very dangerous for forensic purposes. The truth will never be known. Consistency lacks in such kind of witness. Susceptibility to misinformation is imminent through weakening of memory by time factor (Davis and Loftus 2005, Schmolck, Buffalo and Squire 2000)). It is interesting to note that talking results to misinformation more than writing. For sure “written word is sacred.” A lie is easily said than written. The mind captures what it hears more than what it reads. The sounds last more than the readings of writings. Unfortunately it is very easy to alter what had been said. Said words lack evidence if unrecorded. You cannot prove a person to have said something if you have no proof that he actually said that. This is what Loftus found when the study concluded that time has effect on what is said. Some people have argued that misinformation has no impact on the memory of a human. Some truths to this argument are admissible. For example, try to figure out a person who has changed his name. May be this person was previously called Brown and now he is called Bright. There is no way, despite the years which will elapse, will that person come to forget that he was once called Brown. This is though under a normal person scenario because illnesses occur and erase everything. Implanting a different thing like you were called Brow and not Brown can bring in confusion but the weight will lie on the side of Brown. This can be termed as areas of interest. Memory never fades for areas as of despite the implantation of falsehood later. This phenomenon of the mind sticking to clarity of memory is what researchers of the 1980s concluded (McCloskey and Zaragoza 1985). Their argument was based on the ideology that misinformation can only try to confuse those who had no clear information originally. This is true to some extent. Just to figure out how rumours spread even on the social sites. If you throw a certain rumours on one side of the social network and wait for it on the other side, you will get a totally different thing. This is because the last person is pushing forward what he really does not know. He has a received information which he has no way to confirm the truth. You can give it a trial and confirm this fact. If those people in the channel of rumours mongering are fed with new version of the story, they adopt it and forget the former one. This is what McCloskey and Zaragoza were arguing for. According to them, the only person whose memory cannot be jogged with is the originator of that rumours. The rest are prone to manipulation through misguided information. Through their experiment of a burglar who picked a hammer and misled subjects told it was a screwdriver, Zaragoza and his friend were able to conclude that memory impairment is not possible. Nevertheless, it was found that the modified test had misinformation traces (Ayer and Reder 1998). Deliberation is thus associated with the memory fading naturally and not necessarily due to implantation. There argument is though not very valid as it is possible to alter the memory of a person. The people you trust play an important role in your memory. By default, children trust their parents. Whatever their parents say is presumed to be the absolute truth. When these people are used in giving misguided information, then the process achieves its objectives easily. The impairment has been influenced by conviction that the parent is never wrong. It is not hard to say that “I can’t recall that episode” but as long as it has received approval of the parent, that episode really happened. This happens. Variables which Affect Identification Accuracy The legal framework trust more eyewitness than any other form of evidence. It results to a direct evidence of conviction. But as has been seen above that the memory can be impaired by a number of issues, it is very important to take precautionary measures to ensure that the evidence extracted from an eyewitness is accurate and reliable. One of those measures includes getting immediate none influenced explanation of what the eyewitness saw. This explanation is later counter checked with what the eyewitness would say after exposure to several misleading information (Eakin, Schreiber and Sergent-Marshall 2003). If the evidence fails to metamorphosis, then it is adopted as reliable and accurate, otherwise it is unreliable. Remember that there should be no suggestive or clue oriented enticements aimed at boosting the recalling effect. Due to the above, a number of variables are associated with evidence extracted from an eyewitness. The characteristic of the witness himself is fundamental. The intelligence eyewitness is very instrumental. This intelligence means the ability to recall is high and is also depended on age (Karpel, Hoyer and Toglia 2001). The intelligence ensures that there is no confusion when foreign information is brought into the original information (Curran, Schacter, Johnson and Spinks 2001). An intelligent person will have the confidence to say that he cannot recall what he did not see and he is free from drugs including alcohol which temporarily misinforms (Assefi and Garry 2002). Confusion and influence is very high for a person who is not intelligent enough. Sex also plays an important role in eyewitness. It is assumed that women have a higher ability of recalling things than men. So a woman may recall a lot of things including dates and time. But men on the other side lack the element of fear which could ruin a forensic exercise. A woman can say anything when subjected to danger but a man remains calm for a longer period. This calmness is needed to recall the events as they happened. The event itself is also very crucial in establishing a memory that will last for a lifetime (Schwartz, Meissner, Hoffman, Evans and Frazier 2004). If the event was just a blink of the eye, the witness may not have captured anything. This fact is what criminals capitalize as they try to run their show swiftly. They know delay not only makes them be caught at the scene but also makes them be known by the people they are harassing. Hence the time of exposure to the happening is very important (Coboria, Mazzoni, Kirsch and Milling 2002). Anything else which formed part of the happening like a weapon works better in establishing the memory of an eyewitness or not. Events which follow thereafter, whether suggestive or otherwise play an important role. This includes the instruction which may be given at a police station at a time of writing the statement. The variables are chronological. There are others which may take different forms. For example, the system variable or estimator-variable is on use. Structuring is also another form. In eye witnessing, simultaneous or sequential formulas are used. Conclusion Memory loss is a fact. It may be natural or artificially generated. The artificial methods are the misinformation plantation which erodes the real and replaces it with a false truth. A lie is sweet and people stick to the lie more than the truth. For eye witnessing, cases of mistaken identity have been common. Eye witnessing is the only way to get absolute truths because other source of evidence like figure print is not fully reliable. Getting DNA specimen from every crime scene is also unreliable. This calls for seriousness in the way eye witness is handled so that it becomes reliable. Remember that not even an eyewitness confidence that can guarantee accuracy or warning but ability to resist implantation of false information. Research is still going on in this field to open up new ideologies on how to resist implantation of false memory. There is a belief that the same way the memory can be erased through implantation of falsehood, there is a way in which it can be revived without being suggestive in any way. 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