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  • Essay / Memory and Eyewitness Testimony: The Reliability of Witnesses

    The debate over the reliability of eyewitnesses is long, as eyewitnesses can be a key element in legal cases, particularly in criminal investigations. The purpose of having witnesses testify to a crime in court is to support the prosecutor's or defense attorney's case in the hope that the truth will be revealed through the adversarial system - this is the ideal. Several studies, notably those conducted by Loftus, Tversky, and Kahneman in the mid-1970s, explored how witnesses could be steered toward particular responses when asked questions that insinuated details of the incident or questions involving a set of biased answers (as cited in Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay However, at the time, less attention was paid to nonverbal communication and its effects on memory. Nonverbal communication such as gestures are found everywhere in human interactions because they add clarity to speech and allow for more effective communication between speaker and listener (Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013). Gurney, Pine, and Wiseman's Gesture Misinformation Effect explored how gestures can influence how one understands and remembers information (2013). Gurney, Pine, and Wiseman referenced Kelly, Barr, Church, and Lynch's 1999 experiment where two participating groups were shown a video of a woman saying, "My brother when goes to the gym," although the message in the two videos were identical, the gestures varied. (cited in Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013). One group watched the video where no gestures accompanied the video, while the other group saw the video of the woman making the gesture of shooting a basketball (as cited in Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013 ). As a result, those who saw the latter video falsely remembered the events and claimed that the woman's brother was playing basketball (as cited in Gurney, Pine & Wiseman, 2013). Gurney, Pine, and Wiseman applied a similar concept to their own experiments which also resulted in similar results. Interaction between the Crown, Defense and the witness takes place during testimony and cross-examination and the use of gestures, in combination with post-event visual details and the time elapsed between the incident and the trail, can distort the witness's memories of the event. However, the witness does not consider these factors because they become embedded in his memory and he believes that this is what he originally witnessed..