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This handbook chapter reviews how intellectual disability, autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, dissociation, trauma, alcohol, and marijuana may affect eyewitness memory and reporting. It describes research on completeness, accuracy, suggestibility, encoding, and retrieval, noting that effects vary by condition, questioning method, delay, and substance exposure.
The self-serving bias describes how people tend to credit their own abilities for successes while explaining failures through circumstances or other people, often sincerely rather than deceptively. The paper reviews research on the bias and its limits, then explains how it can shape involved witnesses’ attributions of responsibility while applying equally to all parties.
The self-generation effect is the finding that information people produce themselves can be remembered better than information they simply read, although the advantage varies with the task. The paper summarizes studies connecting the effect to the mental operations used during learning and notes that generated information may improve memory for an item while leaving memory for its source or context unchanged or impaired.
Schemas are knowledge frameworks and scripts are expectations about the usual sequence of events; both help people interpret experience but can also shape what they remember. The paper reviews research showing that schemas guide attention and fill gaps during recall, sometimes leading people to omit atypical details or confidently remember expected details that were absent.
Rosy retrospection is the tendency for people to evaluate past events more positively in hindsight than they rated them while the events were happening. The paper describes studies comparing anticipated, real-time, and later evaluations, and discusses fading affect bias—the faster fading of negative feelings—as a proposed explanation for this shift in emotional assessment.
The reminiscence bump is the disproportionate availability of autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood, often around ages ten to thirty. The paper reviews evidence across memory tasks and cultures, outlines competing explanations involving novelty, cognitive ability, identity, and cultural life scripts, and discusses what the pattern can and cannot establish about testimony.
Remembering is a reconstructive process that can strengthen, suppress, or alter the information a person later reports. The paper reviews the testing effect and retrieval-induced changes, explaining that repeated recall can preserve some details while making competing details harder to access or reshaping recollection, with implications for witness interviews and testimony.
The paper distinguishes recovered memories from claims that traumatic memories were repressed and later restored, and reviews the scientific dispute around those claims. It discusses alternative explanations for periods without disclosure, how suggestive techniques can contribute to false memories, and the evidence and cautions relevant to evaluating recovered-memory testimony.
Persistence is the intrusive, unwelcome return of memories or thoughts about a stressful experience, and it can follow ordinary conflicts as well as trauma. The overview notes that reflecting on an event may help people consider future responses, while repeated reliving can heighten distress for some people; it cites PTSD as an example of persistence.
The peak-end rule describes how retrospective evaluations of an experience are shaped especially by its most intense moment and its ending, while duration neglect refers to the limited role an event’s total length may play in that evaluation. The paper considers these findings in relation to testimony and explains that retrospective ratings do not establish that a person’s memory for specific event details is inaccurate.
