Eyewitness to What Isn't

Source: Matthew Sharps

Eyewitness memory is not entirely reliable. This unreliability can derive from inherent limitations in the perception of criminal acts (including relative darkness, brevity of exposure, and occlusion of important actions by interposed objects; e.g., Sharps, 2022, 2024), and from limitations inherent in the nature of human memory itself, which tends to become reconfigured, with time, in the directions of gist, brevity, and personal belief (Bartlett, 1932).

The reconfigurative factor of personal belief is of particular importance here. Bartlett (1932) showed that our prior belief systems can significantly alter our memory for text, and that expectations, based on our beliefs, which derive even from the language in which a visual stimulus is described, can significantly change our visual memories (Bartlett, 1932; Loftus, 1979).

These limitations on eyewitness memory seem reasonable to most of us. Eyewitness cognition is ultimately based on information, and perception and memory are at the core of information processing. Our personal beliefs are based on our views of that information, so it's not terribly surprising that those beliefs might also have reconfigurative effects on our memories, as originally discovered by Bartlett (1932).

Yet these effects can be extreme. In research in my own laboratory, we have found that the second most common type of eyewitness error, after the physical appearance of the perpetrator, lies in imagination; people inadvertently make up details of eyewitness situations, with no realization that they are doing so.

We have also found that people who witness a static photograph of a crime in progress frequently, and inadvertently, create “memories” of actions that might follow the action depicted in the photograph, believing that they actually saw these possible actions when they were not depicted in the photograph at all. These actions, clearly “remembered,” had never existed outside the minds of those who firmly believed they remembered them (Sharps, 2022, 2024)!

So, although many eyewitness errors derive from perceptual and memory processes per se, our beliefs and our imagination also operate to reconfigure our memories, and this is where we must go beyond the pure cognitive science of memory if we want to have a full understanding of the eyewitness realm. Affective processes, mood, and emotion are obviously involved both in our belief systems and in our imaginative lives, and important research has begun to address the critical role of affective processes in the realm of false memories.

Factors outside the purely cognitive realm have been known to influence false memory for some time, of course, even in some rather arcane areas. Whether or not one subscribes to the physical prospect of actual space alien abductions, it is known that many such reported experiences are not ultimately borne out by the available evidence (see Sharps, 2024). So, what might be responsible for the formation of such false memories, which can be very disturbing to those who experience them? Clancy et al. (2002) demonstrated over 20 years ago that individuals who exhibited high levels of hypnotic suggestibility and schizotypic features were more likely to report memories of such experiences. Especially important for the topic of emotion and false memory was the finding that those who exhibited depressive symptoms also tended more toward these reports.

Thus, in the relatively exotic eyewitness realm of beliefs in personal alien abduction, we see a connection between emotionality and the prospect of false memory. This connection has been further explored in less exotic realms, using implanted misinformation to test the influence of mood on memory, and in the area of mood congruency, the concept that information consistent with our moods is more likely to be successfully remembered. The results of this research have not been entirely consistent or conclusive (see Shahvaroughi et al., 2025, for review).

However, a recent study may be very useful in starting to make sense of the relationship of affective processes to false beliefs. Shahvaroughi et al. (2025) asked respondents to complete a list of autobiographical events. Those who had not experienced specific events were then exposed to standard mood-induction procedures, involving combined music and imagery of positive or negative valence. These respondents were then presented with a survey which suggested that they had in fact reported experiencing one of the critical events.

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Interestingly, mood, with reference to the mood-induction procedures, did not influence false beliefs in this study. The authors hypothesize that this may have resulted from insufficient strength or duration of the mood induction procedure, although speculatively, other factors might also have been involved. However, respondents were more likely to develop false beliefs concerning the negative events than the positive ones.

As acknowledged by the authors, much more research remains to provide a definitive theory in this area. However, this research points to a very important potential factor in the world of eyewitness memory: the fact that, at least in this study, the negativity which helped to produce false memories was inherent in the event to be remembered, rather than in the mood of the respondent per se.

In the criminal justice system, much of what eyewitnesses report is negative in the extreme. This research strongly suggests that the negativity of a given situation, resulting in horror, fear, or disgust on the part of the given witness, may be extremely important for the false memories that we observe repeatedly both in the experimental laboratory and in criminal investigation itself.

The effects of emotion on memory are complex to say the least; this may be especially true in the forensic realm. However, current research is beginning to move beyond the traditional, relatively narrow focus on the internal dynamics of the memory process itself. The interactive analysis of cognition and affect, together with the influence of other individual and environmental determinants of memory, is beginning to give us a much better and broader grasp of the nature of eyewitness memory, and of the role of eyewitness processes in other areas of forensic psychology as well (Sharps, 2024).