Family Weekly, June 6, 1982

Behavior: Eyewitness News: Why Your Memory May Deceive You

by Mary Ellin Barrett
A penny for your thoughts: Which of these drawings of a 1-cent coin is accurate? If you're like
most people who have taken this simple memory test, you probably won't answer correctly
(Give up? The answer is at the end of the story.)

Fortunately, recalling the head of a penny is not a life or death matter - but what if you were
being asked to remember the face of a criminal? An accurate recollection would be much more
crucial but, according to new research, no more likely: Recent findings show that memory is a
lot more fallible than we think and, specifically, that eyewitnesses' critical recollections of
crimes and accidents are often precariously unreliable.
Though many of us like to believe that our memories are diligent recording devices capable of
storing accurate and complete accounts of the past, investigators are now questioning that
popular view and suggesting instead that the recall process is selective, subjective and
malleable. "We really construct memories rather than record them," explains Elizabeth Loftus,
Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Washington and author of Memory
(Addison Wesley, 1980). "We store bits and pieces of information, and when it comes time to
retrieve we take bits and pieces of our experience from different times and we integrate it."
Adds Robert Buckhout, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Brooklyn College and co-author of
Psychology and Criminal Justice (Harper & Row, 1981). "The information that agets in is
always added to in memory; it is always changed."
Nowhere have memory's short-comings been better illustrated than in recent research on
eyewitnesses. Enough actual cases have been documented for Dr. Buckhout to estimate that
perhaps thousands of people have been wrongly punished for crimes because of errors in
eyewitness testimony. One of the most well-publicized cases occurred in 1979 when Rev.
Bernard Pagano, a Delaware priest, was identified by eyewitnesses and tried for a series of
armed robberies. Just as the prosecution was resting its case, another man confessed the crimes.
Dr. Loftus has written about a similar case in Washington state in which a man, who was
identified by witnesses and convicted fo rape, attempted rape and robbery, was imprisoned, only
to be released when someone else confessed.
Eyewitnesses can fail in several key ways. Investigators have found, for example, that often
witnesses misperceive crimes or accidents in the first place. Studies have shown that crimes are
particularly hard to remember because such factors as fear, stress, surprise and violence can get
in the way of accurate observation. Dr. Loftus notes, for example, that "if you see something
violent it can cause retrograde amnesia, a forgetting of details that occurred prior to the eruption
of the violence." And she also points out that factors such as eyesight, hearing ability, prior
knowledge and prior expectations can distort what is seen, heard and committed to a person's
memory.
Prejudices can be especially damaging. In his experimental work, Dr. Buckhout has shown
subjects a drawing of a black man and a white man standing side by side on a subway, with the
white man holding a razor: "Those who have seen the razor who are white tend to put it in the
hands of the black man.," he notes. "They also tend to report that the men are arguing and they
blame the argument on the black man."
Memories can also be altered during the investigative process. Research has indicated that
under the pressure of repeated questioning, a witness vulnerable to suggestion and wanting to
be cooperative may change his story or fill in gaps in his memory. For example, while showing
people films of crimes or accidents, Loftus has purposely tried to distort their memories with
leading questions containing inaccurate information: "People will tell you they saw stop signs
when they were yield signs or that they saw green lights that were actually red simply because
they were suggested to them, she notes.
In an attempt to reduce the chances of inaccurate testimony, many investigators are turning to
hypnosis as a technique for improving witness memory. But Martin T. Orne, M.D., Ph.D., a
professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on hypnosis who
testified in the Patty Hearst and Hillside Strangler cases, warns that this technique decreases
critical judgment and causes the witness to want to please the hypnotist, making the witness
even more vulnerable to suggestion and fabrication. Many hypnotized witnesses, he notes,
"convert what they believed happened into actual memories." In other cases "the beliefs of the
hypnotist can all too easily become the memories of the witness."
It is Dr. Orne's recommendation that hypnosis be used solely to get leads in an investigation and
not to "enhance" the memory of witnesses who will later testify in court. "Nobody requires the
police officer to limit himself to reliable sources," he says, "but unreliable sources can't be used
in court."
Harry Arons, head of the Ethical Hypnosis Training Center in South Orange, N.J., who has
hypnotized between 800 and 900 people for "forensic" purposes, disagrees. Although he
concedes that "a hypnotized person will sometimes fantasize things which aren't accurate," he
notes that about 60 percent of the time we get information valuable to the prosecution or the
defense."
Dr. Loftus offers some recommendations for solving the problem of faulty witness memory. The
first is that witness-memory experts be allowed to testify at trials to "focus the jury's attention
on the importance of the eyewitness problem." Although she notes that the use of experts is
growing (she herself has testified about 70 times) she points out that some judges feel such
testimony invades the province of the jury.
She also has advance for future witnesses: "Concentrate on what's happening and as soon as it's
over write down everything you remember."
And by the way, remember the penny test? The correct choice is drawing A. But don't feel too
bad if your guess was wrong. When research psychologists Raymond Nickerson and Marilyn
Adams gave the test, fewer than half of their subjects got it right.
Large center heading: One specialist estimates that perhaps thousands of people have been
wrongly punished for crimes because of errors in eyewitness testimony.