Several psychologists and present court systems capitalize on a process of assessing a person’s memories, in what is referred to as eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony is a method that a person has experienced or seen and is then utilized to aid in research or a court system. This research is normally utilized with the court system to determine and gain intelligence concerning a great event that has found itself within the system. Even though the testimonies are commonly utilized within cases and court events, several people have argued that eyewitness testimony can be compromised with false information that eventually misguides the people relying on it as the primary source (Houston, Hope, Memon, & Read, 2013) . For the court to determine a case well, they need a true witness to make a true testimony.
Article 1 Summary: Ignoring Memory Hints: The Stubborn Influence of Environmental Cues on Recognition Memory
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In this article, researchers did a study on how explicit memory cueing paradigm is utilized to assess if respondents to this study could deliberately assume reliable environmental clues when they are pre-informed. They determined that the participants would be compromised by the cues that they are exposed to after a recognition scrutiny. Participants may find it a challenge to determine if their decision is entirely absolute and the effect of post-distinctive information may be experienced spontaneously. Therefore, the study is concluded by determining that it is challenging to do away with the effect of external cues irrespective of whether participants are exposed to them before or after recognition memory probes. Participants, representing the eyewitnesses, would be directly affected by the cues, as they will be motivated to present a falsified account. Further motivation will cause them to ignore the cues totally ( Selmeczy & Dobbins, 2017) . Therefore, people can be manipulated by cues and incentives to give false views on something that they could have reported accurately.
Article 2 Summary: Expert Testimony on Eyewitness Evidence: In Search of Common Sense
The authors have confirmed the previous findings in the case studies that suggest that many people have been wrongfully convicted because of false eyewitness recognition and testimonies. Expert eyewitness testimony gives a chance for jury verifying the facts to be helped in their decision-making endeavors so that suspects are not wrongly convicted on false accounts. The authors support that eyewitnesses are prone to and have always made errors leading to many innocent persons being convicted when they had falsely identified. Therefore, they suggest that going forward, more training and development is needful for legal professionals and jurors so that cases of mistaken eyewitness testimonies are reduced, to eliminate unjust imprisonment cases in the United States (Houston et al., 2013). The researchers noted that jurors and legal professionals are insensitive to compromised procedures that are applied in law enforcement. They are not careful to sense and resist false feedbacks or inconsistent instructions. Even potential jurors find it challenging to differentiate between accurate and imprecise witnesses. Thus, the main issue that causes people to be convicted wrongly is because of poor knowledge base of jurors as far as eyewitness testimony is concerned. Thus, jurors should use common sense to differentiate between a true and an inaccurate witness by themselves and a fabricated testimony of a witness.
Analysis
After the analysis of these two articles, it is evident that recognition decisions are frequently made considering the aspect of environmental information one has. Some eyewitness accounts are influenced by the extent to which we are aware of our environment rather than our internally produced memory content. There could also be uncontrolled and controlled situations of cue inclusion during recognition of the eyewitness. People’s feedback or testimonies and confidence can be manipulated by environmental information that they are exposed to during the process of decision-making ( Selmeczy & Dobbins, 2017) . For instance, the lawyer can falsify an eyewitness accounts in court, even when there is no extra social information like confidence displayed by the testifier.
Jurors still have a challenge to differentiate between accurate and inaccurate witnesses by themselves. As such, other factors should be examined before a testimony can be qualified. Another action that should be considered seriously includes training judges and other legal experts concerning factors possibly influencing the preciseness and the dependability of eyewitness testimony (Houston et al., 2013). The assessment of methodology that is used to assess the level of knowledge concerning eyewitness issues should be done cautiously. If the methodology is not considered keenly, the likelihood of the knowledge of eyewitness testimony to be compromised will be eliminated.
There are undoubtedly instances where one persistently makes a false testimony concerning the incidence of an event. In such instances, these people can provide untrue eyewitness testimonies that can possibly make another person be convicted for something that they did not commit. They may get something that they did not warrant for in the court because of someone who witnessed falsely against them. There are also instances when a person insists or believes that something occurred when in the actual sense it never occurred or vice versa. This scenario shows that people can unconsciously be making a false witness and presenting to the court what is untrue yet they do not know ( Selmeczy & Dobbins, 2017) . Such information can be construed to be true in the courts since it is challenging to perceive their authenticity. Until the time these scenarios that lead to false eyewitness testimonies are settled or lessened, the eyewitness testimonies should not be relied on as a true source. It should not be utilized as a primary source of evidence to a court case. It can only be used to supplement other sources of evidence that have been submitted to the courts.
References
Houston, K. A., Hope, L., Memon, A., & Read, D. (2013). Expert Testimony on Eyewitness Evidence: In Search of Common Sense. Behavioral Sciences and the Law. Law 31:637- 651.
Selmeczy, D., & Dobbins, I. G. (2017). Ignoring memory hints: The stubborn influence of environmental cues on recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , 43 (9), 1448.
