Tag
This overview explains how an initial reference value or suggestive wording can pull a witness’s estimates of speed, distance, height, duration, or other quantities toward an anchor. It reviews experiments showing that question wording can alter numerical estimates and related recollections, and it describes why precise-sounding testimony may still be approximate and sensitive to how the question was asked.
This overview distinguishes inattentional blindness, in which an unexpected visible event goes unnoticed, from change blindness, in which a change between views is missed. It reviews experiments involving unexpected events and person substitutions, explaining how selective attention can lead honest witnesses both to miss something that was present and to misidentify someone they believe they saw.
This overview describes dissociation as a range of experiences involving disruptions in the integration of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception, and reviews how researchers measure it. It summarizes mixed research linking higher dissociation with susceptibility to misinformation or false memory, emphasizing that the evidence is correlational and variable and that a dissociation score cannot determine whether a particular memory is true or false.
Intellectual disability can affect reasoning, learning, and adaptive behavior, but it does not by itself make a witness either reliable or unreliable. This overview explains that people with mild intellectual disabilities often give accurate but less complete accounts in open-ended free recall, while closed, leading, or repeated questions can increase acquiescence and errors.
This overview explains that ADHD-related memory difficulties are linked especially to attention, working memory, and the controlled processes used to retrieve information, rather than to a global loss of memory. It reviews findings that basic learning and recognition may be relatively intact while open-ended recall can contain gaps or intrusions, and it discusses the implications for witness accounts, interviewing, and the evaluation of contested confessions.
This overview describes how Alzheimer’s disease progressively affects episodic memory for personally experienced events, the kind of memory often involved in witness testimony. It reviews evidence that recent-event recall and recognition become impaired, while some remote or emotionally salient memories may be relatively preserved, and explains why reliability and competency require an individualized assessment of disease stage and the memory at issue.
This overview explains misattribution of memory, also known as a source-monitoring error, as assigning a recollection to the wrong origin. It describes cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion, and summarizes how incomplete encoding and judgment processes can contribute to these errors.
The Zeigarnik effect describes the reported tendency to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones, first explored by psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik after observing a waiter’s recall of unpaid orders. The source notes that replication findings have been mixed and suggests that the effect may depend especially on how important the interrupted task is to the person.
The testing effect is the finding that retrieving information from memory can strengthen later recall more than studying the same material again. The paper reviews evidence and explanations for retrieval practice, then applies the principle to witness interviews, explaining that early open-ended recall may preserve accurate details while suggestive retrieval can reinforce errors.
The subadditivity effect occurs when people judge a broad possibility as less likely than the probabilities they assign to its specific parts, so unpacking a possibility can change perceived likelihood without changing the facts. The paper explains research on this judgment pattern, its limits, and how concrete alternatives may affect courtroom probability assessments while remaining dependent on evidentiary support.
