Eyewitness Testimony

Robert Fettgather holds a BA in psychology from San Jose State University as well as Masters and Doctoral degrees. He works as an associate faculty at Mission College in Santa Clara, educating students in different areas of psychology and human development. He is interested in the role of memory as it impacts the lifespan

If you have watched some dramas based on our legal system, you no doubt know how fictional attorneys esteem the eye witness in the court room. While eyewitness testimony is quite persuasive to a courtroom of jurors, it may not be particularly reliable.

Elizabeth Loftus has spent over thirty years studying the reliability of eyewitness memories. She has demonstrated that what people see and hear about an event after the fact can actually affect the accuracy of their recollections for that event. Following a traumatic childhood experience with a false memory, Loftus began to study rich false memories characterized by “the subjective feeling that one is experiencing a genuine recollection, replete with sensory details, and even expressed with confidence and emotion, even though the event never happened."

The very nature of memory may make it an unreliable source of information in court. Specifically, memory is reconstructive. We tend to remember only some aspects of any given event. To make our accounts of the event make sense, we re-construct it, filling in with detail that is generated by our minds to make sense of the event. Recollecting the event, most of us fail to recognize the imperfect nature of the remembrance.

The retrieval of memories is a much more constructive process than most people assume. Several other factors affect the accuracy of information retrieval. One such factor is the misinformation effect in which false information presented after an event influences the memory of that event. When insinuations or suggestions from others engender inaccurate memories, this is referred to as the false memory syndrome. All of this and much more can complicate legal proceedings.