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Cryptomnesia occurs when a person recalls previously encountered information but mistakes it for a new idea or personal observation. The article reviews research on unconscious plagiarism and explains how source-monitoring failures may lead a witness to report information learned from another person, an investigator, or media coverage as something directly seen.
The cross-race effect describes the average tendency to recognize faces of one’s own racial group more accurately than faces of other groups. The article reviews explanations involving perceptual experience and face categorization, and discusses how this research bears on eyewitness identification instructions and the assessment of individual cases.
Context can shape how memories are formed and later retrieved, making recall easier when relevant features of the original setting are reinstated. The article also explains that contextual information can bias forensic judgments, and discusses both context-reinstatement interviewing and procedures that shield examiners from irrelevant case details.
Consistency bias leads people to remember their past attitudes and feelings as more like their current views than they actually were. The article describes how memory reconstructs earlier beliefs, emotions, and relationships in light of the present, and explains why a witness’s sincere claim that an opinion never changed may differ from contemporaneous records.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in ways that support an existing expectation. The article explains how this bias can shape investigations and forensic judgments, including interpretation of ambiguous evidence, and describes safeguards such as blind testing, documenting information exposure, and independent review.
Alcohol can weaken attention, judgment, and the formation of new memories even when a person does not experience a blackout. The article explains that intoxicated witnesses often recall fewer details, while research does not find that the details they do report are generally less accurate; it also discusses suggestibility, sober follow-up interviews, and limits on estimating one’s intoxication.
Eyewitness confidence can help indicate identification accuracy, but its value depends on when and how it is measured. The article reviews research showing that confidence recorded immediately after a fair, properly administered lineup is more informative than certainty expressed later, which can be inflated by feedback, repeated questioning, and other influences.
This paper explains childhood amnesia, the scarcity of adults’ episodic memories from the first years of life, and how its boundary changes with development. It reviews possible explanations and discusses the careful, probabilistic use of this research when evaluating claims about memories of very early events.
