Do You See What "Eye" See?

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of my project is to determine the reliability of eyewitness testimony . In a trial, the jury needs irrefutable evidence to send someone to jail. Niether the jury nor the eye witnesses can afford to make mistakes. That's where my project comes in. Take a robbery, for example. The people who just got robbed will go down to headquarters to testify as to what they saw. The whole point of my project is to determine the reliability of eyewitness testimony. I wanted three questions answered: 1) The basic question which is how reliable is eyewitness testimony; 2)I also wanted to find out if boys or girls are better at eyewitness testimony; and 3) I wanted to find out which was more reliable, testifying immediately after the robbery or waiting a few days when the witnesses may have a chance to calm down and think about what they saw. Methods/Materials Methods: I wrote a script to set the scene for a robbery; Then my friends formed the cast for my video; Next we filmed the robbery; Then I wrote out a crime scene questionnaire; At school I showed the class the movie;I gave them the questionare; They answered the questions; I sorted the answer sheets by boys and girls and added up how many right and wrong answers each had; Two days later I handed out the questionnaire again to the same group and went through the same process; I summarized the results and made the graphs; and I put my poster together. Materials:Digital video camera; Actors; Costumes; "Nerph" guns; Sunglasses; Phone; Computer; CD; Questionnaire sheet; Microsoft excel software Results I discovered that eyewitness testimony wasn't that reliable,and that people remembered more details immediatly after the event happened. Also I found out that boys were better at accurately remembering the event immediately after the event and after a few days as well. Conclusions/Discussion The results of my hypothesis was two-thirds correct. I was correct about eyewitness testimony not being very reliable. I also was correct in my hypothesis that eyewitness testimony was more reliable immediately after the event than waiting for a few days. But I was incorrect thinking that girls would be better recalling details of an event than boys. The boys did a lot better job remembering than the girls. (However, throughout watching the video the girls were giggling.) I learned a lot about eyewitness testimony and now know it isn't very reliable.

Competition history

• CSEF 2007 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0610

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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