Yuille and Cutshall (1986) suggested that EWT is not as easily affected by misleading information, leading questions, post-event discussion, or anxiety. They investigated a real-life shooting incident, where 21 witnesses were interviewed by police. 4-5 months after this, 13 agreed to a research interview (to test post-event discussion) where the researchers asked leading questions and misleading information. Most witnesses were highly accurate in their accounts and there was little to no change in the accuracy of recall. This also challenges the effect of anxiety, as the real-life incident resulted in death and serious injury yet still held accurate EWT.
Leading questions, misleading information, and post-event discussion were found to have no effect on real-life witnesses, suggesting that the laboratory experiments may suffer from low ecological validity. This challenges the findings of Loftus.