A Study On Postevent Information Influencing On The Accuracy Of Eyewitness Testimony

From the psychology point of view, studies of eyewitness testimony have important meanings. There are many studies in eyewitness testimony area in American and other countries, and several variables that influence the accuracy of eyewitness testimony were found. But few studies on different type of event and different postevent information were carried out. In our country experiment studies on eyewitness testimony were even few.The experiment designed as 2(type of event)×2(gender)×2(postevent information), there were 101 Participants in this experiment. The main results were:1.Take the memory performance of subject information as dependent variable, and take gender, type of event, postevent information as independent variables, we found the type of event has main effect (F(1,94)=21.017,P<0.01). Compared with memory performance of nonviolent event, the memory performance of violent event was much higher. And the postevent information also has main effect(F(1,94)=4.418,P<0.038), the memory performance between control and misleading participants reached significant level The main effect of gender and interaction between gender and other factors were not found.2.Take the memory performance of context information as dependent variable, and take gender, type of event, postevent information as independent variables, we found the postevent information has main effect (F(1,94)=19.179,P<.0.01),the memory performance of control participants is much higher than the memory performance of misleading participants. The interaction effect between the type of event and the postevent information has reached significant level(F(1,94)=7.854,P<0.01).3.Gender factor have shown no influence on the confidence of memory event's information(t=1.483,p>0.05;t=0.341,p>0.05.4. Participants were much certain about subject information in violent event than in nonviolent even(tt=-4.358,p<0.001), but there were no significant different about context information(t=-0.214,p>0.05). The confidence of subject information between control participants and misleading participants has not reached the significant level(t=1.746,P>0.05), but there were significant differences about context information(t=4.372,P<0.001).