Psychological research Essay

Eyewitness memory for details of an event can be affected at the registration stage by witness factors and event factors. Witness factors include age, stress and expectations. For example, several studies have shown that children typically give fewer details about an event they have witnessed than adults. Similarly, List (1986) found that older people may also recall less than younger people. In addition, even though a high level of arousal (stress) would increase your level of performance, too much arousal would lower it. That is to say that a very frightened person will start to repress memories and force them to the back of their mind where they can never be retrieved again. Information is lost with the passage of time, which can be explained by the trace decay theory of forgetting. Over time, â€Å"basic† information is retained, especially from a significant event. Much of the detail is lost, and misleading information is typically given after an event if participants are able to recall this new information as if they’d seen it. However, this might only be partial. As with the influence of exposure time on memory, this too was demonstrated by Ebbinghaus (1885). It has also been shown in a naturalistic study of long term forgetting, carried out by Wagenaar and Groeneweg in1990. Seventy-eight survivors of the concentration camp, Camp Erika, were interviewed between 1984 and 1987 about their camp experiences. The information they gave was compared with earlier evidence they had given just after the end of the war. There was general agreement in the later interviews on basic information. All but three of the thirty-eight people who had been tortured by the camp commandant, for example, remembered his name. However, much of the detail had been lost. In conclusion, while basic information may be well remembered over time, details tend to be forgotten. On the whole, storage factors can affect recall. Basic information is often retained, but detailed information is lost over time. Memory can be supplemented by later information. It can be distorted by misleading information, known as the misinformation effect. This can also lead to completely inaccurate information being given. The misinformation effect has been challenged in terms of whether it is the result of memory impairment of the effects of bias in the testing situation.