It’s always been a common belief that sleep is involved in strengthening memories. Researchers David Morgan; PhD student, Laura Mickes; senior author at University of Bristol, and other researchers.from Royal Holloway tested this theory. By conducting a large-scale online experiment with 4,000 participants, they measured the impact of sleep on eyewitness identification accuracy on experimental eyewitnesses. Half of the participants watched a video of a mock crime and went to sleep, while the other half stayed awake. They were all tested 12 hours after watching the video on their memory for the perpetrator in the video during a line-up.
Laura Mickes said, “based on prior work that sleep improves memory, we predicted that it would in this case too. It did not. There was no difference in memory performance between the sleep and wake groups.” In other words, sleeping does not benefit eyewitness identification accuracy because both participants who slept and stayed awake were equally likely to determine innocent from guilty suspects. Their research shows that if a suspect was identified with high confidence, they were more likely to be accurate than if the suspect was identified with low confidence.
So what does this mean for the criminal justice system today? My understanding is that police should not tell victims of crimes or bystanders to “sleep it off to refresh their memory” because it won’t help them. However, if the eyewitness is confident with their answer then it should be more trustworthy than someone who is less confident with their selection from a lineup. This is probably already known, but having an extra study to prove the psychology behind confidence should be assuring to crime investigators.
Sources:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-12-memory-eyewitnesses.html
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It's true that eyewitness testimonies are unreliable, sleep or no sleep. To date, nearly 350 people have been released after DNA evidence has deemed them innocent. Around 70% of those wrongfully convicted people were made guilty from eyewitness testimonies. Misidentification can often mean that the true perpetrator is still left at large to continue committing crimes. We need to be able to trust the criminal justice system, which means a heavier reliance on factual and scientific evidence when available, and only a loose reliance on eyewitness testimonies.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7758