Eyewitness testimony in relation to biases associated with age

Abstract

Studies have shown there are several factors which influence eyewitness memory, such as cognitive biases and age. This study involved young adults (18-35 years) and older adults (60 and over) to look at their eyewitness memory performance after witnessing a crime. Participants watched a video of a nonviolent crime (i.e., theft). Then, identified the suspect in a simultaneous, photographic lineup. The purpose of this study was to examine how cognitive biases help or hinder the memory performance for young and older adults. While we predicted to see an own-age bias in both younger and older adults, there was no significant finding, which may be due to the difficulty of the suspect lineup. While there were no significant results from this study, the lack of significant results does have some implications. The first being witnesses of all ages make inaccurate identifications, not just older witnesses. The second being the use of off grainy video footage, such as CCTV (i.e., security cameras) as evidence to use for witness identifications can negatively impact the witness’s ability to accurately encode personal characteristics and later recognize those features during a lineup. Future studies could look at whether witness confidence plays a role in their accuracy when making an identification or whether individuals of different age groups rely on differing processing methods to encode facial features when witnessing a crime.