Okay, like any short program, Brain Games gives multiple examples throughout the episode that have to do with the main subject. The example that I would like everyone to focus on, is the crime portrayed at the opening of the episode and how the witnesses remember the event.
(Unfortunately the videos were taken down...)
In Part 2, eight witnesses observe a lineup.Overwhelmingly, the man in the lineup that the witnesses determined to be the thief was number five. When I was watching this myself, I was certain that when I saw the lineup, number three was the thief. Lucky for me, I stuck to my guns and did not let the other witnesses persuade my opinion. Sure enough, the thief was lineup number three.
According to the neuroscience professor featured on the episode, this phenomenon is called "unconscious transference". It occurs when the brain recognizes a face that is not necessarily the individual that they are trying to conjure. As a result, the brain transfers the identity of the unknown to the recognized face, even creating false scenarios around this transference in order to validate the memory. The problems and issues that arise from this function of the brain are multiplied two-fold when it applies to lineup testimonies.
As the detective stated, "eyewitness testimony is considered by judges and most people to be the most reliable information." This is distressing because as the episode continues to show, eyewitness testimony is definitely not all it's cracked up to be. Realistically, eyewitness testimony should be the least convincing piece of evidence since the major cause of wrongful convictions is faulty human memory.
According to the neuroscience professor featured on the episode, this phenomenon is called "unconscious transference". It occurs when the brain recognizes a face that is not necessarily the individual that they are trying to conjure. As a result, the brain transfers the identity of the unknown to the recognized face, even creating false scenarios around this transference in order to validate the memory. The problems and issues that arise from this function of the brain are multiplied two-fold when it applies to lineup testimonies.
As the detective stated, "eyewitness testimony is considered by judges and most people to be the most reliable information." This is distressing because as the episode continues to show, eyewitness testimony is definitely not all it's cracked up to be. Realistically, eyewitness testimony should be the least convincing piece of evidence since the major cause of wrongful convictions is faulty human memory.
2 comments:
This blog entry reminded me of an Elizabeth Loftus interview we watched in class about how ineffective lineups are in solving a crime. After reading this article on PBS, I found another memory retrieval error that affects our memory of a perpetrators face called cross-racial identification. Cross-racial identification is the difficulty we have identifying strangers of a race different then ours. Our brain scans a face differently when we are not of the same race and therefore the accuracy of our memory of their appearance will be jeopardized making a crime line up flawed.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/interviews/loftus.html
I wrote part of my paper on retrieval-induced forgetting and the verbal-overshadowing effect. A famous study was done by two scientists named Schooler and Engstler-Schooler in 1990 that found that recognition performance for certain stimuli is impaired if described verbally. The experiment found that people who verbally described a criminal's face in a video were less likely to be correct than when forced-recognition task without verbal description was performed. Westerman and Lester found a more general effect of verbal-overshadowing that created a shift in processing. This means that the verbal-overshadowing effect is not stimulus specific although only some stimulus allow this effect to occur like faces and colors.
Here is a link to their study:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1423566
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