Purpose:  Understand and apply behavioral terminology and concepts to a real-life situation.  Relate the importance of objectivity in scientific inquiry to the inherently subjective nature of human experience (LO 6)

TASK:

Watch the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drQ3i6EejPE

Scenario:  You are a defense attorney and one of the students in the video above has wrongfully identified your client as the thief of the laptop.Given what you know about:

• effortful vs. automatic encoding
• state-dependent and mood-congruent memory
• interference, and
• the constructive nature of memory (including misinformation, imagination, and source amnesia effects),

how would you challenge the validity and reliability of that eyewitness testimony?  What arguments would you use to confront the witness in your cross-examination and attack his/her credibility?

Write a defense of at least 300 words, answering the questions in red above.  Use the research articles below, as well as the material from the rest of this lesson, to support your conclusions.  Make sure to use the Key Terms correctly and format them in bold.

Research Article #1:  Misinformation Effect  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-based-justice-acknowledges-our-corrupt-memories/

Research Article #2: Flashbulb memories https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-09/flashbulb-memories-of-dramatic-events-such-as-9-11-arent-as-accurate-as-believed

Research Article #3: How accurate are our memories of 9/11?  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/911-memory-accuracy/

Research Article #4: Eyewitness identification https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/

Your defense/evaluation of the reliability of eyewitness testimony (integrating the above-mentioned issues) should be double-spaced, with 1-inch margins, and in 12-point font.  See the “More About the Eyewitness Identification Assignment” page and the “Eyewitness Identification APA Checklist” for more resources and information. 

Leave time to submit a draft of your assignment to the Free Tutoring services for helpful feedback. Submit your write-up in the “Writing Assignment #1:  Eyewitness Identification” Assignment Tool.