Eyewitness Testimony
Eyewitness testimony is used as a legal term, for someone who refers to an occurrence
of an event they have witnessed. Eyewitness testimony is used a lot for court cases to help
prove that someone is guilty or innocent, but is it always reliable? While giving a testimony the
eyewitness has to use memory retrieval and try and remember completely and in detail what
happened during the event. That is all that is relied on is the eyewitness’s memory, if there is
one small detail that is off it could completely ruin someone’s life or ruin someone’s evidence. In
this paper memory and how it connects to an eyewitness testimony will be discussed.
There are different kinds of memory that plays a big role when trying to look back and
remember an important event. First is long- and short-term memory. Short-term memory is
information that someone has just obtained or is currently thinking about, it can be over a
period of just about 30 seconds to a couple of days before. Long-term memory is something
that you are able to remember from over an extended time, from maybe hours ago or even
decades earlier. Lastly the main part of an eyewitness’s remembrance is being able to recall and
recognize the memory. In recall, the witness has to be able to retrieve the information of the
event from their long-term memories. In recognition they must be able to recognize something
familiar about the scene to know the information is correct. What also goes with memory is the
persons visual perception, which is the way in which the brain construes and processes visual
information. Since everyone’s brain is different and interprets things differently, someone’s
visual perception is not always correct. This plays along in an eyewitness testimony, they could
perceive information incorrectly, recall their memory of the event incorrectly, many things could
happen that could cause the testimony to fail and be unreliable.
Eyewitness testimony is used as a legal term, for someone who refers to an occurrence
of an event they have witnessed. Eyewitness testimony is used a lot for court cases to help
prove that someone is guilty or innocent, but is it always reliable? While giving a testimony the
eyewitness has to use memory retrieval and try and remember completely and in detail what
happened during the event. That is all that is relied on is the eyewitness’s memory, if there is
one small detail that is off it could completely ruin someone’s life or ruin someone’s evidence. In
this paper memory and how it connects to an eyewitness testimony will be discussed.
There are different kinds of memory that plays a big role when trying to look back and
remember an important event. First is long- and short-term memory. Short-term memory is
information that someone has just obtained or is currently thinking about, it can be over a
period of just about 30 seconds to a couple of days before. Long-term memory is something
that you are able to remember from over an extended time, from maybe hours ago or even
decades earlier. Lastly the main part of an eyewitness’s remembrance is being able to recall and
recognize the memory. In recall, the witness has to be able to retrieve the information of the
event from their long-term memories. In recognition they must be able to recognize something
familiar about the scene to know the information is correct. What also goes with memory is the
persons visual perception, which is the way in which the brain construes and processes visual
information. Since everyone’s brain is different and interprets things differently, someone’s
visual perception is not always correct. This plays along in an eyewitness testimony, they could
perceive information incorrectly, recall their memory of the event incorrectly, many things could
happen that could cause the testimony to fail and be unreliable.
