John Wixted

Imagine for a moment that you're absolutely certain about the person you saw commit a crime.

You're so confident you'd be willing to testify about it under oath in a court of law.

Your memory is strong, crystal clear, absolutely unshakable.

But now imagine that that same memory, though it feels 100% true, is actually false and could send an innocent person to prison, maybe even to death row.

This is the complex and sometimes heartbreaking world of eyewitness memory.

But for decades, we've been telling ourselves a story about eyewitness memory that itself may not be entirely true.

Most of you have probably heard cautionary tales about how wildly unreliable eyewitness testimony can be.

You may have heard about famous cases, like the case of Ronald Cotton, where Jennifer Thompson, a rape victim, misidentified him as her attacker, as she would later recall her testimony from his criminal trial.

I was absolutely, positively, without a doubt certain that he was the man who raped me when I got on that witness stand, and nobody was gonna tell me any different.

The jury understandably found her testimony convincing.

Cotton was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

But Ronald Cotton did not rape Jennifer Thompson.

Instead, it was a known rapist prowling her neighborhood that night.

Cotton spent almost 11 years in prison before DNA testing finally proved his innocence and revealed the identity of the true rapist, a man named Bobby Poole.

Jennifer Thompson's testimony was sincere, but her memory was wrong.

DNA exoneration cases just like this one involving confident misidentifications have happened literally hundreds of times, leading many to seriously question the reliability of eyewitness memory.

But wrongful convictions like these are not the only reason why most people think eyewitness memory is unreliable.

For years, scientific research has also painted a damning picture of human memory.

Starting in the 1970s, scientists like Elizabeth Loftus began to show how shockingly easy it is to manipulate memory.

In groundbreaking studies, she and others implanted false memories in adults of having been lost in a shopping mall as a child or having been attacked by a vicious animal, even though these things never actually happened.