In the summer of 2014, an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Eyewitnesses reported that Brown had his hands raised signifying surrender when he was shot. This led to sustained protests following the shooting and the decision by a grand jury not to indict the police officer. The prosecutor released the evidence seen by the grand jury, including the testimony of all eyewitnesses and the police officer. Even though all of the witnesses viewed the same event, not all eyewitnesses agreed on whether Brown was kneeling or his hands were up during the final shots. You can see a summary of the eyewitness statements compiled by Laura Santhanam and Vanessa Dennis for PBS Newshour here.

Seeing something with your own eyes is considered the best proof that something happened; juries, the police, and the public are usually persuaded by eyewitness testimony. The broader question you will be considering with this assignment is whether the science of memory and perception supports our faith in eyewitness testimony or whether it can explain the disparity between witness statements in the Brown case.  Watch and read the following items and then answer the questions which follow.

Introduction to the Case

• Steve Titus: A 31-year-old restaurant manager from Seattle, engaged to Gretchen.

• Inciting Incident: The couple was pulled over by the police after their car resembled one used in a rape case involving a female hitchhiker.

The Investigation and Trial

• Photo Lineup: Police showed the victim a photo lineup including Titus's picture; she identified him as "the closest."

• Trial: Titus proclaimed his innocence, but the victim testified on the stand claiming she was "absolutely positive" he was the rapist.

• Conviction: Titus was convicted of rape despite his insistence on innocence; family and fiancée were devastated.

Aftermath of the Conviction

• Loss and Betrayal:

  • Lost job, engagement, and savings due to his wrongful conviction.

  • Became embittered by the legal system.

• Investigation for Justice: Titus reached out to an investigative journalist who uncovered the real rapist—a man who confessed and was responsible for multiple rapes.

• Exoneration: Upon hearing this evidence, the judge declared, "Titus, free."

The Emotional Toll

• Aftermath for Titus: Despite being exonerated, Titus was left with unresolved anger and loss; he subsequently filed a civil lawsuit against those he felt were responsible.

  • Fatal Stress: Just days before the civil trial, Titus suffered a heart attack, exacerbated by stress, dying at age 35.

The Role of Memory in Wrongful Convictions

• Expertise in Memory: The speaker, a psychological scientist, studies memory, particularly false memories.

• Statistics on Wrongful Convictions: 300 innocent individuals convicted in the U.S.; 75% attributed to faulty eyewitness memory.

• Misconceptions About Memory: Many people think memory functions like a recording; however, it is actually constructive and reconstructive.

Research on False Memory

• Historical Studies: Conducted experiments in the 1970s regarding the malleability of memory:

  • Participants witnessed a simulated accident; leading questions significantly affected their recall (e.g., "smashed" vs. "hit") and led to false beliefs about details such as broken glass.

• Stress and Memory: Recent studies with U.S. military personnel demonstrated suggestive misinformation could lead to misidentification, even after stressful experiences.

Misinformation Sources

• Misinformation: Present in questioning techniques, conversations with other witnesses, and media coverage.

Extreme Memory Issues

• Incidence of Repressed Memories: In the 1990s, patients left therapy with bizarre memories of trauma, often resulting from suggestive therapeutic practices (e.g., hypnosis).

• Research Findings: Investigated how certain therapeutic practices could lead to false memories; one experiment successfully planted a false memory in 25% of participants.

Ethical Considerations and Backlash

• Research Ethics: Studies subjected to thorough evaluations to ensure participant safety and ethical standards.

• Personal Consequences: The speaker faced hostility, threats, and attempts to discredit his research after criticizing repressed memory therapy practices.

We tend to place too much trust our memory and firmly believe that everything happened exactly as we recall it, but false memories do exist. While the most intuitive examples are those resulting from specific psychiatric disorders, false memories can easily be created without any pathological trigger.

Memory is a faulty reconstruction of our mental experiences, susceptible to being influenced by our prior knowledge, beliefs, goals, mental state, emotions, and social context. Thus, what is retrieved from memory can be substantially different from what was initially encoded, and what was encoded can also differ from what really happened.

There are different types of human memory. Sensory memory is information acquired and retained by the senses, for example remembering what something looks like after just a glimpse. Short-term memory (or working memory) is the temporary storage and manipulation of a small amount of information which is being processed and is readily-available at any time, necessary for complex cognitive tasks such as language. Long-term memory is the storage of information over an indefinite period of time. Long-term memory can either be explicit (conscious) or implicit (unconscious). The latter, also known as procedural memory is our “know-how”; our memory of skills and how to do things. Explicit or declarative memory is our “know-what”; our memories that can be consciously recalled such as facts, knowledge or events.

Within declarative memory, we can differentiate semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory is the registry of general facts, meanings, concepts and knowledge that is independent of personal experience and context. Episodic memory, on the other hand, is our recollection of experiences and autobiographical events to which we can associate a context, a time, a place, and emotions; it is a representation of reality that aggregates multiple inputs and a constructive process that is liable to error and bias. According to numerous behavioral and neuroimaging studies, it is the constructive nature of episodic memory that that lays the groundwork for the assembly of false memories.

Memory creation includes at least three different processes susceptible to specific errors that may result in false memories: encoding, consolidation and retrieval.

Encoding, the first step in memory formation, begins with perception through the senses and allows the perceived event to be converted into a construct that can be stored in the brain and accessed later. An example of false memories formed at encoding is seen when a memory of an imagined event is falsely remembered as a perceived event. It is likely that this is due to the similar characteristics of imagined and perceived events that are translated into similar encoding mechanisms.

Consolidation, the processes of memory stabilization after the encoding, is actively affected by sleep. Interestingly, recent studies have suggested that sleep may not only be essential for the accurate consolidation of declarative memory, but also promote declarative memory distortions. As a result, false memories can be created during consolidation as new knowledge representations, distinct from the original encoded event.

Retrieval is the “remembering” of stored events or information. False memory generation at retrieval is mostly influenced by the cues or tasks that induce it. A common example is confusing a stranger with an old acquaintance because something in the stranger triggers a recollection that makes people believe they are recognizing someone they have never actually met before.

Despite being mostly inoffensive, false memories may actually be quite harmful when, for example, in a legal context, a “clear” recollection by a witness is actually not so clear, leading to wrong judicial decisions.

Keep this in mind the next time you argue about something you “clearly remember”.