Factors underlying Eyewitness Memory Accuracy: Individual Differences and Confidence

Abstract

False memory, modulated by factors, such as emotion and semantic information about an event, can impede accurate suspect identification. Negative mood and semantic processing are found to create false memory by establishing associations between events. The associations include confounding the events’ order, mixing the events’ contents, and using schemas that sometimes deviate from the actual circumstances. The inconsistency of emotion while encoding and retrieving information can also cause the failure of recalling correct crime scene details. To increase the value of eyewitness testimony, this review discussed several factors that can impact eyewitness memory accuracy. Lab studies are largely based on individual cognitive differences, the level of confidence made with suspect identifications, and individual cross-cultural differences. High executive functional (EF) availability and high confidence level were found to corroborate higher accuracy of identification across tasks. Individuals from individualistic cultures were found to focus more on central details than those from collectivistic cultures. Additionally, eyewitness memory accuracy can be assessed by the response time of witnesses, which is another powerful indicator of eyewitness memory accuracy besides confidence. The difference in eyewitness memory accuracy between lab studies and reality is a gap in this field. It is recommended to use the two one-sided tests (TOST) to show that there is no statistical association between suspect identification accuracy and memory strength to minimise the gap. This review analysed several factors impacting eyewitness memory accuracy and provided insights into how the lab studies can be applied to the real world.