Hieronymi, Bennet, B.F (2023) Effects of Scene Memorability on Eyewitness Memory. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.
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Abstract
Eyewitness testimony is subject to bias and environmental influences and can be the source of wrongful convictions. This study investigates whether a memorable crime scene will lead to stronger episodic memory associations between the elements that make up a crime event, thereby benefiting cued recognition of the culprit in a lineup. Analogous to the formation of the episodic memory, our experiment consists of two phases. The first phase, in which the participants (N = 113) were shown three different images, is called the encoding phase. The images depicted either a crime scene, a culprit or a stolen object. While the pictures of the culprit and the stolen object remained unchanged for all participants, the presented crime scenes differed in their memorability, which was objectified by means of a memorability score. The intervention groups were thus divided into memorable and non-memorable according to the crime scene conditions. In the subsequent second phase, the participants equally completed a cued retrieval task. Participants were asked to identify the culprit in a four-options forced choice format, using either the scene image or the object image as a cue. Results show that participants identified the culprit more often in the memorable conditions. Therefore, we conclude that scene memorability positively influences identification accuracy and thus increases the reliability of eyewitness testimony. Additionally, this experimental design provided data about the associations in an episodic memory. We asked whether the above-stated positive influence of scene memorability translates to all associations in an episodic memory. We compared the memorability effect across the different cueing conditions, thereby analysing the difference in associations of scene and culprit and respectively object and culprit. The memorability effect was detected in both cueing conditions. Thus, the strength of one association in episodic memory was correlated to the strength of other associations in the same episodic memory. This indicates dependence between associations retrieved from episodic memory. Keywords: Eyewitness Memory, Episodic Memory, Memorability, Dependent Theory
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Supervisor name: | Nieuwenstein, M.R. |
| Degree programme: | Psychology |
| Differentiation route: | None [Bachelor Psychology] |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Aug 2023 12:05 |
| Last Modified: | 19 Apr 2024 14:10 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/2739 |
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