James Bullen

Hi, Sana.

It's used very frequently in Australia.

It's a really persuasive form of evidence for courts, juries, justice systems.

So if an eyewitness testimony is available, chances are that it will be called upon in a court and it will be used.

Now, I spoke to Dr. Celine Van Gold, who we also had on the last episode of the show, talking about false confessions.

She's an associate professor at the University of Sydney.

Celine says a huge amount of weight is put on eyewitness testimony in court systems.

That's where we're going to go next.

Encoding is the first step in how we remember.

The steps of memory go encoding, storage, then retrieval.

But let's focus on step two, storage.

And just to pick up on the tagging, so what does that mean exactly?

Mostly that will be the details you experienced in this particular event.

Here, the car crash that you witnessed.

But tags can overlap.

For adults, Celine says that it's actually a lot easier to organise because over time we've learnt how to sort and store the information that's coming in.

Celine says that these source monitoring mistakes, that's our brains filling gaps with information from elsewhere, happen more often than we think.

This is also related to what we heard about last episode of the series, where in interrogations, small changes in how questions are asked can alter the way someone remembers an event.

But the percentages Celine van Gogh mentioned, only remembering about 30% of an event, that was shocking to me.

Okay, Sana, I want to show you a video now.