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Activities in this unit reveal how eyewitness testimony is subject to unconscious memory distortions and biases even among the most confident of witnesses. More
Myth: Eyewitness Testimony is the Best Kind of Evidence
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Researchers find that young children aren’t always vulnerable to suggestive false memories and that adults go along with suggestions when they match up with their associations. More
Children Make Better Eyewitnesses than Adults in Certain Circumstances
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The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is tapping into psychological science to develop new guidelines for eyewitness identification procedures. More
Justice Department Turns to Psychological Science to Improve Eyewitness Testimony
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Police lineups in which distinctive individual marks or features are not altered can impair witnesses’ ability to distinguish between innocent and guilty suspects. More
Witnesses Confuse Innocent and Guilty Suspects with ‘Unfair’ Lineups
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The same experimental standards that apply to scientific research could also be applied to police lineups to improve the accuracy of eyewitness identifications, says APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Gary L. Wells. More
Injecting Science Into Police Lineups
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Our capacity for remembering items that a ren’t relevant to the task at hand -- such as memory for faces in a crowd -- may be greater than previously thought. More
More Than Just Faces in a Crowd
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Brain activity can be used to tell whether someone recognizes details they encountered in normal, daily life, which may have implications for criminal investigations and use in courtrooms. More
Brain Wave May Be Used to Detect What People Have Seen, Recognize
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A research replication initiative confirms earlier findings, showing that asking witnesses to provide a written description of a suspect can impair their ability to select that suspect from a lineup — the so-called “verbal overshadowing” effect. More
New Insights Into Eyewitness Memory From Groundbreaking Replication Initiative
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APS Past President Elizabeth Loftus speaks about her research -- investigating false memory, the reliability of eyewitness reports, and memories “recovered” through therapy -- and its impact on how we think about eyewitness testimony. More
Inside the Psychologist’s Studio: Elizabeth Loftus