Crime Solving: Can You Correctly Report What You Saw?

by Rachel Bell, Ashleigh M. Maxcey, Elizabeth F. Loftus

When someone has to report a crime, it is important that they describe the crime accurately. However, there can be many errors in their description because of the way memory works. There are three stages of memory that describe how we get information, keep it in memory, and then pull out that information to remember it. Unfortunately, because memory is not like a video camera that perfectly records our life events, errors can happen in all three memory stages. Memory can also be confused for other reasons, for example, when we try to identify a person of a different race. In this paper, we explain some of the errors that can happen across different stages of memory, and we suggest an activity you can do with your friends to see memory errors happen.

14 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 1, 2018