What is encoding, storage, retrieval, and forgetting curve of eyewitness testimony?

Question

i'm in the sevnth grade and i need anwers to these defintions in your own words of specifically what they mean. this is for my science fair project and i need them as soon as possible. Thanks!!

Answer 1

It's Saturday and the local library in your area is open. These things you are asking about can be found in any basic social psychology book. It deals with the concept of how we form memories. In this case, for eyewitness testimony of criminal activities. In spite of popular belief, our memories are far from perfect and we often make MANY mistakes in what we believe to be "perfect" memories. We distort things that enter our perception and when we encode memories we do it in a way that is meaningful to us, in that way, we may store things that are incorrect and highly inaccurate. One famous study showed a picture of a white man and a black man arguing on the bus. The white man was holding an object (looked somewhat like a knife) in his hand and the black man was unarmed. Because of racism and things like that, when people recalled the image, more times than not, they remembered the black man holding the knife. This is just one example.