The ageing eyewitness

  • November 6, 2012
The ageing eyewitness

A Gates Cambridge Scholar who is studying eyewitness psychology has won The Manuel Lopez-Rey Prize for her MPhil in criminological research.

A Gates Cambridge Scholar who is studying eyewitness psychology has won The Manuel Lopez-Rey Prize for her MPhil in criminological research.

Katrin Pfeil [2012], who has just begun her PhD, shares the prize with a criminology student. It is awarded by the Department of Criminology at the University of Cambridge for outstanding performance.

Her research focuses on ways to improve the testimony and identification performance of older adult witnesses (60 years and over).

She says that relatively little is known about older witnesses despite the fact that our ageing society means there is likely to be an increase in older adults being witnesses of crimes.

She states: “Bearing in mind older adults’ memory decline, and the fact that they generally tend to perform poorer both in terms of testimony and person identification compared to young adults, it is most important to get further insights into enhancement strategies of their witness performance.”

For her MPhil research she examined the impact of circadian rhythm as a possibility to aid older adults’ person identification performance. She found that a procedure as easy as scheduling the ID session according to the older person’s optimal time of day significantly improved their identification performance, which meant they made significantly more correct identifications when the perpetrator was in the line-up.

More importantly they also made significantly fewer false identifications in target absent line-ups, i.e. when the perpetrator was in fact not among the photographs. Katrin says this is especially important to prevent wrongful convictions.

She states: “Being awarded the Lopez-Rey Graduate Prize to me shows that my research is meaningful and supports me in continuing research in that area during my PhD.”

Picture credit: Ambro and www.freedigitalphotos.net

Latest News

Rainforest carbon credit schemes less effective than thought, claims report

The effectiveness of widely used rainforest carbon credit schemes has been called into question by a new study. The study, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) Carbon Crediting,  by the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project is co-authored by Gates Cambridge Scholar Libby Blanchard [2012] and has been making headlines around the world. It brings […]

Gates Cambridge Trust seeks Global Engagement Officer

About us  Gates Cambridge Scholarships are prestigious, highly competitive, full-cost scholarships awarded to outstanding applicants from countries outside the UK to pursue a full-time postgraduate degree in any subject available at the University of Cambridge. Gates Cambridge Scholars become part of a lifelong global community defined by its core value of commitment to improving the […]

How combining clinical data could improve traumatic brain injury outcomes

Researchers, led by a Gates Cambridge Scholar, have integrated all medical data collected from traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients to calculate, for the first time, the personalised contribution of each clinical event to long-term recovery. This international effort marks a step towards patient-centred treatment in the intensive care unit (ICU). Shubhayu Bhattacharyay [2020] is the lead […]

Building a more sustainable future

When Alejandro Rivera Rivera [2015] was doing his MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development at Cambridge, a key theme was dealing with complexity, change and uncertainty. The course gave him some tools to cope, but he could never have imagined how useful these would come in when he returned to Guatemala and co-founded a business […]