Eyewitness testimony (EWT) comes from someone who has seen a crime. They give a statement, might identify someone from a line up and may have to give testimony in court. This can have important consequences such as deciding at who is at fault in a car accident. If EWT is unreliable then someone might be wrongly convicted.
One case of how EWT is unreliable has been shown by Loftus who has carried out many studies into ETW. Two men in Montana were out hunting bears and when they returned the light was bad and they were tired. They heard a noise down the road and thought it was a bear so fired towards the sound. However it was not a bear, it was actually a couple and the woman was killed. The jury found it hard to understand ‘event factors’ – the state of mind of the individual and how it affects processing (the men were tired and hungry).
Eyewitnesses will be in an emotional state and so EWT is not always reliable. Witnesses can be swayed by line ups because they want to help and may assume that the person to be identified is in the line-up. They are looking for the person the saw and could just look for the nearest match which is not the same as identifying the person. If a black suspect was in a line-up with five white men and the eyewitness had seen someone black at the crime they are more likely to be chosen.
Bartlett discussed the idea that memory is a reconstruction and that it is not like a DVD. It is actually based on our schemata (previous experience or ideas about what an event should be like) and so EWT might be based on this rather than what happened.
Cue-dependent forgetting would say that the people are not in the same environment when they recall and so there are not the same environment for recall. This means there is a lack of environmental cues. There may also be a lack of state cues because the person will have had heightened emotions when it took place and this may not be the case when the recall at the police station.