Change Blindness and Eyewitness Testimony

Davies, G & Hine, S (2007) Change Blindness and Eyewitness Testimony. The Journal of Psychology, 141 (4), 423-434.

In this article Davis et al reviews research on change blindness and eyewitness testimony this challenges how accurate an individual’s recollection is of a particular event. The authors of this article are Davis who is a well established professor at University of Leicester and Hines who is a former student of the university and now works in IT health care, they provide an accurate overview on research conducted on change blindness which is made up of resources that support their hypothesis. The aim of this article is to show that in not all instances is an individual’s eyewitness testimony accurate enough to rely on. The research methods used were to conduct different field studies to test the recollection of a group of individuals or an individual at random.

The authors focus on research that tests participants in a number of different scenarios, some of which are groups split into two viewing a filmed scene. Half of the group knows they will be asked to review the film and the other half don’t, in mid scene the actor changes with another actor. The average outcome of all studies showed that between 30% and 50% of participants did not notice the changes in the tests. This article is useful to my research as it explores my theory that an eyewitness testimony is not always accurate by using methods that test the eyewitness account of a range of individuals. It achieves this by reviewing research done on groups of voluntary participants and on individual participants that were unaware of being involved in an exercise which showed a significant difference in the two results. The authors used resources that were within 10 years and reviewed it so that it was easily understood by its readers. A limitation that was evident in this article was the fact that in more than one of the research exercises