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I'm your host, Elise Hugh. What if eyewitness memory is more reliable than we've been told?

In this talk, psychologist and memory scientist John Wigstead shares new research that shows

memory is more nuanced than we may think, and that ignoring it at the wrong moments can,

and often does, put innocent people behind bars.

Drawing on real cases, he explains how a witness's first identification before, quote,

memory contamination should not be overlooked and that it can offer remarkably reliable insight,

potentially reshaping what we can and can't trust.

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, Dan, and nobody was going to tell me any different. The jury

...