Celine van Golde

Memory decays very rapidly.

So within the first even hour that we've experienced something, we will forget about 60% of details of what we've witnessed.

DNA evidence, fingerprint evidence, any other type of bodily fluids.

indicates that a person might have been there, but not that they committed a crime necessarily, but all an eyewitness does that.

And there's also a lot of crimes like domestic violence or any type of other crime where often the only evidence that's there is somebody's memory, is the victim or the witness.

So for that reason, before it even goes to court, there is a lot of value in eyewitness memory.

And how much weight is put on this kind of testimony?

When there is a person sitting there, tears in her eyes, saying, like, I saw this with my own eyes, I'm 100% certain that's the person that murdered the other one, it has a very emotive and a strong impact on jury members and on judges.

Jury research has also shown that it is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that you can provide within a jury trial.

We've got various factors that will influence how accurately we can recall a crime.

And that's, for example, our age will have an influence.

So a child will recall something that they've witnessed completely different than an adult will.

But also, for example, if we are paying attention or how stressed that we are at the time that we are recalling something.

And these are factors that will impact our memory at the time that we are encoding what is happening to us.

So this is when we transfer what we're seeing into our memory to be stored and then recalled at a later point in time.

Now, how we store our memory will also impact what and how we remember things.

And this is, for example, how we tag certain memories.

So the pre-existing knowledge that we have will help us to organize all this information that is coming in and store it in a cohesive way.

So if we look at our brain, it's technically like a big neural network where we have we get all little pieces of information that we experience and then we try to store it in this specific like network of little nodes that are interconnected.

So, for example, if I witness a car crash.