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Home > University Institutes > Health, Medical Sciences and Society > Psychology > Facilities > Forensic Science Suite
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Forensic Science SuiteUndergraduate students from What is Psychology 1 use the forensic suite in Semester 1 to learn about false eyewitness testimony in the memory component of the module. Students are taken to a crime scene in a house based on campus and given time to explore the evidence. Later in the classroom they are asked questions separately about what they think happened there and then specific questions are asked about the crime scene.
It has been found that asking certain types of questions can get people to distort their representation of what they think they saw, which is then reflected in the answers they provide. This seminar reflects upon the implication of these answers in eyewitness testimonies and how these questions may be asked in a court of law or to vulnerable witnesses such as children to get a more positive and realistic answer.
This is because it seems that we try to fit past events into our existing representations of the world, making the memory more coherent or make more sense for us. Therefore, our memories themselves are not true mirror reflections of what occurred. A classic experiment by Loftus and Palmer (1974) used video clips of car crashes and demonstrated that something as simple as changing the verb in a sentence (how fast were the cars going when they crashed into each other or bumped into each other) could distort and influence a participant’s memory of the event.
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The programme is accredited as conferring eligibility for the Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership, provided the minimum standard of a lower class Honours is achieved. This is the first step towards becoming a Chartered Psychologist.
