Hello everyone and welcome to the Nature Briefing Chat podcast. This is the show where we chat through

some of the stories that we've been reading about in the Nature Briefing, which is a weekly email newsletter from nature.

And today, your usual hosts are away, but you've got me. I'm Charmany Bundell. And we've also got

Lizzie Gibney. Hi, Lizzie. Hi, thank you for including me today, Charmany. Let's dive straight in. And I'm going to start us off this week. This is a nature feature. And it's all about eyewitness memory and kind of improving the way the legal system deals with eyewitness memory using science. The main thing I know is that we are so incredibly fallible. I always think of that. There's that meme of, you know, people playing basketball and there's a gorilla that you just don't see unless you're told about it. And that has really freaked me out ever since I saw that. They give you a job like count how many throws there are in the basketball team. And because you're focused on that, you don't notice a person in a gorilla suit

walking through the basketball match. But basically, my brain isn't doing the things I think

it's doing is what I took from that. So I would be quite worried myself as an eyewitness.

For a long time now, there has been this sort of understanding that it can be really unreliable.

And one particular big thing that happened was DNA evidence became available.

And people went back and looked at previous cases where they still had evidence that they could

take DNA from and overturned loads of convictions. And so there's the Innocence Project in the US

which does this. And some of their data shows that when they're looking at

the kind of thing that contributed to some of these like false convictions that later got overturned,

a huge number of the big proportion of them involved eyewitness misidentification.

So then how do you factor that in then if you're, you've got a fresh case coming up? You know, how do you direct a jury into like how much to trust eyewitness evidence if we know that it's failed so often in the past?

Well, there has been lots of changes to how things are done in order to sort of try and improve the accuracy of various things. So, for example, police lineups

is a big one because that's when, you know, you're bringing someone in and saying, do you

remember what the suspect looked like? Is it any of these people? And there are lots of things

that you can kind of do wrong with the police lineups that might skew the results you get.

Like, let's say I'm a witness. And there's a police

officer saying, do any of these people look suspicious to you? If that police officer knows who

the suspect is, I can like pick up subtle cues or like that can in some way influence things.

It's not a blinded study basically. If they know the answer already, even if they don't mean to,

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