Eyewitness Research Paper

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Faith smith

Background research

Eyewitness accounts are continuously put in question in the courtroom. By studying how the brain works and what factors influence what we remember how reliable eyewitness accounts are and if they are an accurate source of evidence in crime. Psychologist typically divide the remembering process into three stages. Encoding , storage , and retrieval. Memory is the process of maintaining information over time or for a short period. Memory processes a vast amount of information through sounds pictures and even colors. The memory stores things into two accounts either short- term , or long- term memory. Short term memory is like the brain’s postage note made to keep things for a short period of time , short …show more content…
Subjects that are more reliable or that a person is interested in is more likely to be remembered long term. There are three stages of brain memory , encoding , storage , and retrieval. Encoding is the first stage, it can be compared to as changing money to a different currency to travel to a different county. There are different ways different people encode stuff , it may be by visual or sound or even by meaning and giving representation to something. The next stage is the storage ,storage differs between each person because everyone’s storage capacity is different. One person may be able to store something longer than another. The last stage the process of memory goes through is retrieval , being able to pull something out of storage. We may cannot remember things because we can't pull it out of storage or we had trouble coding. So an important memory that you may have had in the fourth grade , is so hard to retrieve from your memory . And you wonder is that memory traceable any more. There are also more things that affect the way we receive information one way is the misinformation effect . Retroactive interference is the main reason more misinformation concept , the part of brain process where new

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