Topic > Memory and eyewitness testimony: the reliability of witnesses

The debate on the reliability of eyewitnesses has been long since eyewitnesses can be a key component in court cases, particularly criminal trials. The purpose of having crime witnesses testify in court is to aid the prosecutor's or defense attorney's argument in the hope that the truth will be revealed through the adversarial system: this is ideal. Several studies, including those by Loftus, Tversky, and Kahneman from the mid-1970s, have explored how witnesses can be primed for particular answers when asked questions that insinuate details of the incident or questions that have a biased set of answers (such as cited in Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay However, at the time, less attention was paid to nonverbal communication and its effects on memory. Nonverbal communication such as gestures is found everywhere in human interactions as it adds clarity to speech and makes communication between the speaker and listener more effective (Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013). Gurney, Pine, and Wiseman's gestural misinformation effect explored how gestures can influence how one understands and remembers information (2013). Gurney, Pine & Wiseman referred to Kelly, Barr, Church and Lynch's 1999 experiment, where two participating groups were shown a video of a woman saying: "My brother when he goes to the gym", although the message in both videos were identical, the gestures varied (as cited in Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013). One group watches the video in which there were no gestures accompanying it, while the other group was shown the video with the woman making the gesture of shooting a basketball (as cited in Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013 ). As a result, those who viewed the latter video falsely remembered the events and claimed that the woman's brother played basketball (as cited in Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013). Gurney, Pine, and Wiseman applied a similar concept to their own experiments which led to similar results. The interaction between Crown, Defense and witness occurs during testimony and cross-examination and the use of gestures, in combination with post-event visual details and the period of time between the incident and the trace, can distort the memory of the event by the witness. However, the witness does not consider these factors because they become integrated into his memory and he believes that is what he originally witnessed.