Eyewitness to What Isn't

Key points

Eyewitess memory is a cognitive process, but factors outside the cognitive realm are also important.

Witnesses frequently reconfigure their memories, inadvertently, in the direction of personal belief.

Much evidence now indicates that emotion and other personal factors can actively alter memory.

This research is important in forming a more complete picture of eyewitness memory.

Eyewitness memory is not entirely reliable. This unreliability can derive from inherent limitations in the perception of criminal acts (including relative darkness, brevity of exposure, and occlusion of important actions by interposed objects; e.g., Sharps, 2022, 2024), and from limitations inherent in the nature of human memory itself, which tends to become reconfigured , with time, in the direc