Human Memory and Eye Witness Accounts - Information for Writers

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Excerpt from WEAKEST LYNX -

     “Wilson’s stable. In police custody at Suburban. He’s being charged with breaking and entering with intent to harm, and possession.”

     I waited for the rest of the charges.

     Striker pursed his lips.

     “Wait. What about six murders and an attempted murder?” My voice squeaked.

     “The D.A. is having trouble putting together a case. The original six were linked to you by the MO. We have no evidence. None. Though they’ve been working on developing the case since your attack.”

     “But what about me? I saw him. The neighbors saw him. We confirmed the police sketch. Surely…”

     “Subsequent to seeing him, you sustained a traumatic brain injury. The defense can shred your eye-witness report on the witness stand. Same with the neighbors. They were running in the dark. Could be a look alike. There were no prints, no DNA, no motive linking you two. They need something more or they can’t make the case.”

THE INNOCENCE PROJECT "Many wrongful convictions overturned with DNA testing involve multiple causes: 75% involve eyewitness misidentification... Prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective defense, police misconduct and racism are harder to quantify but were also factors in many of the wrongful convictions that have been overturned with DNA testing." 

75% of wrongful convictions involved eyewitness misidentification? How is this possible?

The first thing that needs to be understood about memory is that humans do not process events like a video recorder. We process information based on focus, intensity, and past experiences. 

All of our individual past experiences form "schema" in our memory banks. As we encounter information our brain looks into its schema-files and develops an understanding based on what it has experienced before.

(LINK to a guest blog demonstrating the impact of past schema on present situation) 

When one remembers an incident the various past schema can overlap and mingle. The witness memory can be crystal clear - but it might not be the reality of what took place.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Four Types of Memory

* Cognitive - These are sequences and patterns.
* Motor Vestibular -Body memories such as
   playing a instrument or driving a car
* Emotional/Affective - These are memories of
   feelings like grief and fear.
* State - These are memories from the senses. State
   memories seem to be the most helpful in developing
   a  clear picture of what occurred. PTSD plays from
   this memory - a certain smell or noise can trigger a
   physical reaction. Auditory memories are less reliable than visual
   memory. But  as a plot twist, an author should understand that
   witnesses are more confident in what they hear than what they
   see.

The Stages of Memory 

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

* Short Term - Unimportant data that is processed in the now. If
   the brain deems something to be important it moves the
    information into long term memory.        

* Long Term - Can be retrieved from past events. One's ability to
   recall depends on how information was processed. Processing
   depends on which of the four types of memories or which
   combination were used to interpret and "cluster" (this is basically
   a filing system).

The more significance-in-the-moment and the more types of memories involved create the clearest and most accurate memory picture. As a writer, think about your character. As she remembers something, which of her memory types is she using? For example, does she cognitively recall the fear that slowed her sequence of her actions when she smelled the smoke? Could she be making a profound mistake because she clustered the schema and now has a faulty memory? Did she remember the man saying, "I will kill you!" when she was really merging the event with a nightmare she had had just the night before?  

Remember that no two people could ever remember an event from the same perspective. It's just not possible. What if your characters had completely different memory schemas of an event? Wow - all hell could break loose!

VIDEO QUICK STUDY - (9:02) FALSE MEMORY AND EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY                                             interactive, very interesting!

So we know that people will perceive with four different kinds of memory. They will either store in their long term memory, or not. They will develop a schema based on their past experiences and cluster these in their memory banks. But what are some of the components that might interfere in a clear and accurate memory? 

A list of possibilities:

* Beliefs

Animation of the structure of a section of DNA. The bases lie horizontally between the two spiraling strands. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

* Stress levels

* Cross Racial Identification Bias
   Brains are wired to identify distinctions in our own
   race but NOT other  races. 

* Distinctive Aspects - People will remember
   particularly attractive or especially unattractive
   physicality better than "average" looks.

* Age of Witness - Children and elderly are less
  accurate and their descriptors might be different as
  well. Example: to a five year old "really old" could
  mean someone who is in their thirties.

* Gender - Men and women remember different
   aspects because of how their brains are wired. A
   man, for example, might remember the make and
   year of a car while a woman might remember that

   it was blue.

* Profession - Ex. an artist might have a better ability
   to recall the face structure while a physical
   therapist might notice a posture or unusual gait.    

* Drug or Alcohol Use

* Head Trauma - As in the excerpt from Weakest
   Lynx

* Weapons Focus Effect-If there is a weapon present
   the witness focus remains on the weapon (duh) and
   not on anything else in the environment.
   (LINK - Blog about my experience as a eye witness
     in a simulation)

* Attention - A victim or bystander will pay more
   attention to details if they are aware of what is happening
   than someone who is not aware that something is going on. Even
   if the witnesses are very attentive and good with faces, it is hard
   to find the words to describe a person. Try this experiment - think
   of someone you know very well, now try to describe out loud
   their features so that someone could draw them
   (Witness recall and Police Sketch Artists)

* Setting - Full day light, face full on, length of time of incident
   and time when recalled. 20 min can cause a sharp decrease in the
   number things that can be remembered.

* System Variables - These are police and legal procedures that
   can introduce bias.

In the 1977 Supreme Court decision in Manson v Brathwaite (Information Link)  - It was determined that eyewitnesses are allowed to testify if they are very sure of testimony. If they are unsure it is up to the judge in the case whether to allow or not. Psychological studies have shown that the degree of certainty does not correlate with accuracy. 

Many countries realized that innocent people were going to jail based on false witness memory - remember the witnesses can be 100% sure of themselves. They are not in any way "bad"; it is the way that memory works that makes eye witness testimony so very difficult. In 1999, Janet Reno was tasked with trying to develop procedures to help prevent some of these false-memory reports.

If your book takes place AFTER 1999, it should reflect these changes:

* Police ask open ended questions. Instead of asking, "Did he have
   a gun?" thus planting the memory of a gun, the police should ask,
   "Do you remember a weapon of any kind?"

VIDEO QUICK STUDY - Elizabeth Loftus - Planting False 
Memory (4:20)
VIDEO QUICK STUDY Misinformation Effect (3:46) How questions effect recall

* Police should pause before asking another question, giving the
   witness a chance to think about a situation and perhaps remember
   another detail - This is one I used a lot in my counseling practice:
   Ask. Answer. Wait.

* The police should inform the witness that they can say, "I don't
   know." This helps to prevent the witness from trying to fill in the
   blank with information that is being pulled from a different
   schema.

* The police, when possible, should physically walk the witness
   through the crime scene. This might trigger memories from the 
   "state" memory bank.

* Careful use of Police Lineups - A line up, either in person or with
   photos, should be done in a double-blind scenario. The officers 
   who are conducting the lineup should not know who the suspect
   is. This stops the voice inflection and body language tells that are
   picked up by the brain of the witness ex. "Are you sure that's the 
   right guy?

  VIDEO QUICK STUDY of Line Up Experiment (1:45)

         spoiler - none of the photos were of the criminal

  VIDEO QUICK STUDY - Line Up and False Memory (4:35) The
         students were extremely sure of

         themselves and would have, under the Supreme Court ruling, 
         been allowed to testify. Watch their faces

         as every single one of them realizes that they were wrong.

Relative Judgement - when a witness tries to pick the person who most closely aligns with the memory of that person. To prevent the witness from feeling that they HAVE to make an identification the officers should say that the subject MAY or MAY NOT be in the lineup. Also, the members in the lineup should be presented sequentially one after the other and one at a time. Witness will compare the suspect to the mental picture and not use relative judgement.

         VIDEO QUICK STUDY - Ronald Cotton Exoneration  (4:07)

        

Fillers - the other people in the line-up should look similar. If         the suspect had dreadlocks then the fillers should have dreadlocks. If the witness picks a filler, then it should be noted that their recall

might be questionable. 

         VIDEO QUICK STUDY Comparing with Filler (3:00)
         Shown through an experiment and description

How can your heroine help?

During a crime the heroine could look for anything that is unique and difficult to shed or change such as:

        * Body-type (height, weight), tattoos, scars, focus on ears and
           nose.

        * Movement - limps, postures

        * Voice - lisps, unusual accents or speech patterns

As soon as possible - and without talking to ANYONE ELSE the heroine should sit down and write down all of  the details that she can recall - She could write them, sketch them, or even call and leave a message recording so she can retrieve the information later.

Try this mini-experiment:  Eye Witness - How Do You Stack Up?

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Book Review: Police Procedure and Investigation

Image via WikipediaHowdunit - Police Procedure and Investigation - A Guide for Writers by Lee Lofland
http://www.leelofland.com/

Is listed on Amazon for $13.59 and used from $9.90
http://www.amazon.com/Lee-Lofland/e/B001JRUKC6

RATING: Highly recommended

Lee Lofland was involved in law enforcement for two decades and is now a writer and the sponsor of The Writers’ Police Academy. (For further information about the 2011 WPA please see my labels below. Also, there is a link under my blog list for Graveyard Shift - Lee‘s blog). In person, Lee is hysterical, and I very much looked forward to reading his book, that I was lucky enough to win in the raffle.

This book walks a crime writer through the labyrinth of law enforcement. Chapter 1 starts with an overview of our policing system. Who is in charge of what? How is a police department organized, and just what does a sheriff do anyway? Lofland reviews the hiring process -which is arduous. The departments look into every nook-and-cranny of a potential hire's life. It’s very intrusive. Lofland then reviews the missions of the various federal, state and local agencies. Very helpful if you are trying to figure out who is going to show up and investigate. For example, I thought that drug culture fell under vice - it turns out that many departments have a separate drug department because the manpower need is so great. And the illicit drug investigators will work closely with gang investigators, etc.

Lee then spends a chapter helping us to understand the training. Last spring, I had the opportunity to go to our State police Academy to ask questions. These men and women must maintain high standards in all aspects of their training - one little glitch and they are out. Most police officers with whom I have spoken all tell me that their job is the culmination of a life-long dream; they had always known they were supposed to be officers. Can you imagine the heartbreak of failing to attain the uniform?

Lee goes through the pertinent aspects of the job. He talks about what a police officer does versus a detective. How arrests are made and searches conducted. How death is categorized and investigated along with crime scene investigation techniques including fingerprinting, DNA, and autopsy. He includes the court process, prisons and jails, and the death penalty. And, Lofland loves to critique TV, so he included a chapter entitled, “C.S…I don’t think so.”

Of further help to writers’ is a glossary of terms, an index of 10 codes, drug quantity, and federal sentencing tables.

Lofland has written clearly, in an accessible voice, with vocabulary free of cop-speak. It is non-fiction that has the hold-you-to-the-page quality of a novel. A great reference - if you’re doing your due diligence and want to get the sequencing, procedure and players right.

Related articles

• Mystery Writing, or Why I May Be On An FBI Watchlist (sociallyacceptedmadness.wordpress.com)
• New Novel Captures Intensity of Police Investigation and Politics of Law Enforcement; Book by Larry Watts (prweb.com)

Writers' Police Academy 2011

I huddled in a blue plastic chair in the front of the classroom - teeth chattering, body shivering. The air conditioning blew, even though it was quite cool outside. I had mud to my knees. Rainwater had wicked up the cotton of my jeans, up under my man-sized raincoat to my waist, up past my waist making my black t-shirt lay cold and damp against my stomach. My fingers were red and stiff as I gripped my ballpoint pen, and I drip, drip, dripped the water from my sleeve onto the open pages of my notebook. Heaven.


I was in Greensboro North Carolina for the Writers' Police Academy developed by Lee Lofland and hosted by Guilford Technical Community College and Public Safety Training Academy. I came in from an hour under torrential rains straining to hear the cadaver extrication teacher talking about how to remove a body from a shallow grave.

If I ever write a scene (and now you know I’ll have to) about standing out in a rainstorm during an investigation, I’ll have it down. I know the goose bumps. I know the sucking sounds that feet make when they’re pulled from muddy clay. I understand that the umbrella can only take so much before it gives up and water starts to run in rivulets down one’s nose.


The only sad part for me was that because it had been raining, the school’s crime scene simulator was not functioning - not putting off the aroma of death. And with no scent, there were no hungry insects to cover the “dead body.” I would have liked to have seen that. I would have liked to have smelled that for realism, without the actual reality.

It was a great privilege to spend the last four days with amazing teachers. They brought law enforcement and forensics to life through hands on demonstrations and tutorials. These instructors were the real deal. They train the very people we call when we need help. They have faced sniper fire, conflagration, life and death. What they had never faced was a classroom full of writers. They weren’t ready for us.

There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that the instructors needed to resolve for themselves in order to get their sea legs on the choppy waters of a thriller writer's questions. These men and women had taken oaths to uphold the law and solve the crime -- to foil the bad guy. We needed to know how to thwart the system and stymie authority. We needed the bad guy to make the right choices so only our hero could come in and save the day in the nick of time. That meant asking these instructors to think in a way dichotomous to their instinct. I bet it made for some good stories around their dinner tables.

I could often see their discomfort. Especially when I was asking the EMT if I could equalize a perforated lung by using my daughter's Glucogon needle. Yeah - he called his supervisor over for that one. I understood that our questions ran counter-intuitive to their instinct. But it was also what we needed to know in order to make our writing accurate.

I think most of our instructors volunteered to train us just because they were tired of reading books and watching TV shows, shaking their heads and saying, “That could never happen! That’s not right. These people have no idea what they’re talking about.” We all wanted to understand. That’s why we were there. We wanted to get it right. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the heft of the sniper rifle, the drip pattern of the blood on the wall, the collection of the DNA samples.

I left Virginia to drive to North Carolina on a Thursday afternoon. I took my suitcase to the car, and as I walked back inside I saw big fat drops of blood on my schoolroom floor. I followed the trail up through the family room, up the stairs, to the bathroom. It looked like there had been an ax murder. There were towels soaked in blood, blood in the sink, the toilet, on the walls, spattered on the mirror. But nobody - and luckily no body.

So I’m looking for the victim. “Hey! Who’s bleeding?” I yelled. My son shows up. He’s covered in blood too. “Mom, I think I broke my nose.” Hmm. Yup kid was jumping on the mattress and hit his nose with his own knee. It was spectacular. I got him cleaned up, put on a Band Aid, to keep his nose somewhat in place, and applied ice. In an incredible bid at maturity my daughter had cleaned up all of the blood. I called their dad to pass off the crisis, because I needed to get on the road.

The next day I’m sitting in a class on bloodstain patterns with Dave Pauly, a Professor in the Applied Forensic Sciences Department at Methodist University,and now I could interpret the blood trail that my son had left. Had I been investigated for this incident as a crime, I knew that they would use LCV to show the blood distribution. Even though my daughter had done a good job cleaning up and had even used a bleach based cleaner, it was still detectable. I know that that LCV has 0% false positives, so even if I had a damned good lawyer, he couldn’t punch holes in this forensic evidence. All of it was way too cool.

This week I will be blogging about my experiences at the Writer’s Police Academy. I hope you’ll join me. I’m glad to answer any questions just leave them in the comments below.

Related articles

• Blood Evidence from a Crime Scene (happilyeverafter71011.wordpress.com)