Effects of Age on Eyewitness Testimony

Mercedes Renter

Co-Presenters: Individual Presentation

College: College of Liberal Arts

Major: Forensic Psychology (M.A.)

Faculty Research Mentor: Christine Doyle

Abstract:

Eyewitness testimony has been the main cause of wrongful convictions. The impact of an eyewitness testimony is very crucial in many cases and is not always reliable. The motivation of this study was to see how age affects the reliability of eyewitness testimony as well as including other outside factors. There is a total of 64 participants in this study that are broken into 3 groups based on their age. The first age group contained 23-40 year olds, the 2nd group was 41-59 year olds, and the 3rd group was 60-75 year olds.These groups were all required to take the same survey using a cellphone or computer. When assessing the groups, the hypothesis predicted the younger age would produce the correct answer from a mock-trial within the survey. Some ideas for future research are to force participants to take the survey in person to ensure all the attention is on that survey. The survey could have also included a video for the participants to watch and answer questions based on the video. One last change that could have been made is to provide questions that were unimportant to add stress and replicate a real-life simulation as an eyewitness.