Understanding how the mind works, particularly how we remember, is a crucial component in helping to evaluate and improve eyewitness evidence.

Miscarriages of justice are one of the most significant legal issues that have acted as a catalyst for psychological research.

Follow the investigation of an armed robbery and try to work out which pieces of information are reliable and which contain flaws or are wrong.

Explore psychological knowledge concerning how accurately eyewitnesses provide different types of information.

Observe how DI Bullet gathers information and evaluate the conclusions he comes to.

Observe how DC Sund gathers information and evaluate the conclusions she comes to.

What do witnesses tend to notice? Is it possible for a witness to completely miss a significant event that happens right in front of them?

Examine how a witness can fail to notice a key element of their surroundings change. It could mean that they confuse the identities of those involved.

Questioning, in the context of an investigative interview, is designed to elicit an account or evidence from a person about an event they have witnessed.

Analyse the questions used by DI Bullet in his interviews with the witnesses. Evaluate the information he gathered and the conclusions he reached.

It is easy to alter a memory, by asking leading questions. Techniques like context reinstatement and cognitive interviewing aid accurate memory.

Analyse the questions used by DS Sund in her interviews with the witnesses. Evaluate the information she gathered and the conclusions she reached.

Explore why it is so difficult to describe a face and consider the best ways to obtain the image the witness has in their memory of the perpetrator.

Explore the psychology of face recognition, and find out how this knowledge is being incorporated into the latest composite systems being used by the police.

Eyewitness misidentification seems to be the most common cause of miscarriages of justice so it’s important to understand face recognition.

What other factors do the police need to take into account in the identification procedure? Do DI Bullet and DS Sund incorporate these factors?

DI Bullet was fairly certain of who the armed robbers were and has collected evidence to support his conclusions.

DS Sund collected a great deal of information and was able to piece together a description of what happened and what the perpetrators looked like.

You will work for the defence to evaluate the way evidence was collected and use your eyewitness memory knowledge to show that the prosecution’s case is flawed.

DS Sund conducted her investigation using a very different approach to DI Bullet. Will her investigation stand up to your expert scrutiny?

Piece together your version of what happened in the armed robbery and kidnapping and apply your psychological knowledge.

During the course you have learned a lot about how memory and other mental processes, such as attention, work. Test your knowledge in the end-of-course assessment.

Research is a never-ending cycle of inquiry, with new studies generating new insights which lead to new questions that can only be answered by new studies.

Look at forensic psychology more broadly, the work that forensic psychologists do and the courses in psychology available from The Open University.