In December 1996 almost the entire front page of a daily newspaper was devoted to the report of a court case involving earwitness testimony.
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It is of critical importance that research into children's earwitness memory is also conducted in order to secure justice for child victims and witnesses. Compared to adult earwitness memory, the area of child earwitness memory has been largely neglected. In one of few studies comparing adult and child earwitnesses, Öhman, Eriksson & Granhag (2011) found that only children in the older age-group of 11–13 years performed at above chance levels for voice recognition, compared to the younger-age group of children (aged 7–9) and adults. They suggest that under the age of 10 a child may be overwhelmed by the cognitive demands of the task and so do not perform above chance levels on the task.
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Research investigating earwitness memory has only recently emerged from the shadow of the extensively investigated phenomena of eyewitness memory and eyewitness testimony, despite having been in use within the English justice system since the 1660s. Earwitness memory refers to a person's auditory memory for a crime or incriminatory information they have heard. Much of the research which has been conducted on earwitness memory focuses on speaker recognition, otherwise known as voice recognition, whilst there is less research which investigates memory for environmental sounds. The majority of the literature on voice and face recognition finds a robust face advantage; compared to voice recognition, face recognition appears to be the stronger pathway, with most individuals finding it much more difficult to recall a voice compared to recalling a face.
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Whilst many earwitness accounts are attained directly and 'in-the-moment', many will be acquired over a telephone or over other communication devices. Whether the earwitness hears a conversation or other auditory information in person or hears it over a communication device could impact their rate of accuracy. However, contrary to this prediction, research has found no significant differences between the accuracy of voice identification when the voice was heard directly or over a mobile phone, despite the sound quality seeming poorer in the latter.
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Face overshadowing effect A face overshadowing effect is often found to occur, whereby individuals' voice recognition performance is impaired with the co- presentation of a face. Visual information therefore appears to have the ability to significantly interfere with the recall of auditory information. However, research has investigated whether earwitness memory is impaired to the same extent when the face of the one speaking is concealed in some way. Research shows that when a face is covered, with a balaclava for instance, accuracy for voice identification slightly improves; however a face overshadowing effect still exists despite the earwitness being able to see fewer facial features.
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In 1983, People magazine reported that Marta and actor David Soul had an "open relationship". The article explained, "All through the Starsky and Hutch years David and Lynne lived together but spent time with other people." Marta was an earwitness to the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989.\- of the Oregonian Staff, FRED LEESON.
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In 2013, Greenfield, along with other AMP Board members, created the AMP Awards for Music and Sound, which he had championed among member companies for several years. The AMP Awards debuted on May 7 in New York City and has become the only industry event in the U.S. honoring excellence in music for advertising, branding and media. In 2015, Greenfield began writing a regular column for SHOOTonline about music and popular culture under the heading Earwitness.
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Still, when individuals are asked to remember the voice and the speech content, they are only likely to have remembered the gist of what has been said as opposed to remembering verbatim. This clearly has implications for the amount of weight that is placed upon earwitness testimony in court. Earwitnesses are not typically required to give statements or recall a voice or auditory information immediately after an event has occurred, but instead are required to recall information after a time-delay. This could significantly impair the accuracy of their recall.
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Meanwhile, adults made the highest percentage (55%) of false identifications. They also found that voice pitch level and speaker rate was highly correlated with children's but not adults' false identification rates. Overall however, the results confirmed other studies which have also shown that in general, earwitness performance for unfamiliar voices is poor. Other research found that children aged 11 to 13 years old who were tested very shortly after exposure to a voice made more correct identifications compared with children who were tested after a time interval of two weeks.
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A substantial proportion of the literature into witness testimony finds a robust recall advantage for visual stimuli compared to auditory stimuli. We seem to have a profound memory advantage for visual objects and scenes whilst being poorer at remembering auditory information. This therefore has clear implications for eyewitness and earwitness memory; what is seen should be more likely to be remembered than what is heard by a witness. This finding can be extended to faces and voices; within the person recognition literature, it has been found that individuals are far better at identifying a person by their face as opposed to their voice.
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Compared to memory recall for faces, voice recall appears to be significantly more vulnerable to interference. These consistent findings suggest that earwitness memory is far more vulnerable to the effects of interference compared to eyewitness memory; although the weight placed on eyewitness memory in court should also be carefully considered as there is much evidence to suggest its fallibility. For example, some studies have found that eyewitness identification can be impaired by effects such as the weapon focus effect or verbal overshadowing. Nevertheless, voice recognition appears to be the pathway most significantly impaired by interfering factors.
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Research has investigated how to improve the accuracy of earwitness performance. One study investigated whether an interview called a Cognitive Interview would improve adult or child (11–13 years) voice recognition performance or speech content recall if it was administered immediately after the event. It was predicted that a cognitive interview would improve the likelihood of witnesses making a correct identification and improve recall of speech content, whether immediately after the event of after a time-delay and regardless of age. It was also predicted that adults would recall more content than children, because other studies have indicated that children provide less detail than adults during free recall.
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However, results revealed poor correct identification rates, regardless of the type of interview earwitnesses had received (19.8%), as well as high false identification rates; 38.7% of participants incorrectly identified an innocent suspect. It did not seem to matter if an interview had been conducted shortly after the event or not. Moreover, there did not seem to be any difference between children and adults in terms of the number of suspects they correctly identified by their voice. Many researchers would suggest that this furthers the case for children (aged 11–13) to be thought of as equally capable of proving potentially helpful earwitness accounts within court settings.
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Recent research has investigated the effects of accent on earwitness memory (similar to eyewitness memory but based on what a person heard rather than saw). The study showed that ear-witnesses were more likely to mistake offenders with a different accent than an own-accent, and that their judgements were less confident in reporting other-accent offenders compared to those with their own-accent. The authors of the study present similarities between the own- accent bias and the own-race bias, which states that faces are more easily recognised by people of the same race (own-race) because those people have more experience (higher expertise) with them compared to faces of different races (other-race). This is similar to the prototype representation theory of the own-accent bias (see above).
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Heddon is the author of multiple books, book chapters and journal articles. She authored Autobiography and Performance, and co-author of Devising Performance: A Critical History (both published by Palgrave Macmillan). Her edited collection, Histories and Practices of Live Art, co-edited with Jennie Klein, was published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan. Heddon has written a number of texts about walking and performance, and is connected with the Walking Artists Network.. She contributed a chapter to Walking, Writing and Performance: Autobiographical Texts, and has written a number of articles about walking and performance, including, ‘Walking and Friendship’ (2012); Walking Women: Interviews with Artists on the Move, and Women Walking: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility (2012), with Cathy Turner; and The Horizon of Sound: Soliciting the Earwitness (2010).
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The amount of time between when an individual hears incriminatory information or the voice of their perpetrator, for instance, and the time they are required to recall the auditory information as an earwitness can affect their recall accuracy rate. Memory for auditory information including voice recognition appears to decline over time; studies have found that participants can recall more correct auditory information immediately after the initial presentation than after a four-day time interval, supporting several other studies finding similar results. Furthermore, the extent to which the time-interval affects memory recall for auditory information depends upon whether the witness just heard the auditory information of whether it was accompanied by visual information too, such as the face of the perpetrator. One study has found that recall is enhanced when both auditory information is heard and visual information is seen, as opposed to just hearing auditory information.
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