Tag
Forgetting can reflect information that was never encoded, stored memories that have become harder to retrieve, or interference from other experiences and later information. The article distinguishes these mechanisms and explains their implications for gaps and changes in witness accounts, including how cues, selective questioning, and suggestive memory refreshing may shape recall.
Face recognition is substantially more reliable for familiar people than for unfamiliar faces, which can be difficult to identify or match even when images are available for comparison. The article explains how viewing conditions and individual differences affect performance and considers the implications for eyewitness identification and comparisons of surveillance images.
Facial composites are sketches or generated faces made from a witness’s recollection to produce investigative leads, rather than to establish that a particular person committed an offense. The article reviews their variable identification performance and explains how describing a face, stereotypes, and seeing the composite again can affect a witness’s later memory.
Eyewitness confidence can be informative about accuracy when it is recorded at the initial identification under fair conditions and before outside influence. The article contrasts this with confidence expressed later, which can be inflated by feedback, repetition, and courtroom circumstances, and reviews how researchers and courts assess confidence evidence.
Episodic memory is the system used to remember a particular personally experienced event, including what happened and its context, and it underlies eyewitness accounts. The article contrasts it with general semantic knowledge and explains how failures to bind details to their source, along with consolidation and reconstruction, can contribute to memory errors.
Earwitness memory concerns identifying a person from the sound of a voice, a task that is distinct from describing vocal qualities and is generally difficult for unfamiliar speakers. The article reviews how familiarity, exposure conditions, delay, and lineup procedures affect voice identification, and discusses fair testing and the limits of forensic voice comparison.
Delayed recall concerns how a witness’s account can change between an event and a later report, as memory details fade and post-event experiences shape retrieval. The article reviews differences between central and peripheral details, repeated telling and identification delays, and explains why an early, open-ended account can help document what was initially remembered.
The article describes a research method for evaluating forensic interviews by classifying interviewers’ prompts and counting new details supplied by a child. It distinguishes open invitations and facilitators from focused prompts, including directive, option-posing, and suggestive questions, which differ in how much they risk influencing children’s responses.
Children can recognize faces differently as their face-processing abilities develop, and they are more likely than adults to choose someone when the culprit is absent from a lineup. The article explains why description skill does not reliably predict identification accuracy and reviews safeguards such as unbiased instructions, fair lineups, and child-appropriate procedures.
Autobiographical memory is a person’s recollection of events from their own life, reconstructed from stored knowledge and later cues rather than replayed like a recording. The article explains why vividness, confidence, and consistency do not guarantee accuracy, and reviews how conversations, misinformation, and source confusion can alter personal memories.
