Valerie Reyna
Charles Brainerd
Reprinted from the National Science Foundation research Nugget 11942
Understanding the psychology of memory is a principal concern for the United States legal system. Memory reports are a major source of legal evidence (e.g., in police interviews, depositions, courtroom testimony). For instance, the courts in Cook County, Illinois identified more than 200 murder confessions as being based on false memory reports that conflicted with unimpeachable facts. Equally disturbing, reliance on “evidence” that is infected with false memories allows the guilty to escape prosecution.
In their NSF-funded research program, Cornell University Professors Valerie Reyna and Charles Brainerd challenge core assumptions held in traditional memory theories. Their groundbreaking research isolates the conditions under which children and adults have false memories for eye-witnessed events and shows that children are sometimes more accurate witnesses than adults. The research also identifies the cognitive mechanisms that produce false memories and the types of interview strategies most likely to reduce false memories in police investigation and courtroom testimony.
Evidence gathered by Reyna and Brainerd calls into question traditional theory regarding memory that assumes memory reports are based on event reconstruction. Their "fuzzy trace theory" posits that the brain stores two distinct records of experience -- verbatim traces of actual events and gist traces (a person's understanding of what happened). Recent data from their lab establish that verbatim traces and gist traces operate independently and that when gist traces are especially strong, they can produce "phantom recollection" -- illusory vivid recollections of things that did not happen.
Among their most surprising and counterintuitive discoveries is that children are less susceptible than adults to the most common source of false memory, namely, meaning-based false memories. This challenges a key principle that the law uses to determine the credibility of evidence: that children’s memory reports are more likely to be false than adults’. Reyna and Brainerd demonstrate that young children do not, in fact, produce false memories in the same way or to the same degree as adults. Critically, new findings from the Cornell laboratory demonstrate that specific cues presented during a memory interview can improve the accuracy of children's verbatim memory reports and thereby reduce the baleful consequences of false memories. These findings are especially significant in light of the common practice in legal cases of interviewing children long after they have witnessed the events that are under investigation.
Findings from this important research have been reviewed in The Science of False Memory, a non-technical book that summarizes scientific knowledge that is poised to become as important as DNA testing in separating truth from falsehood in criminal investigations.
For More Information
Laboratory for Rational Decision Making
Memory, Children, and the Law Resources