James Hagen's List: Eyewitness

For more than 30 years, research in criminal justice, social science and behavioral health has pointed overwhelmingly to the conclusion that people aren't very good at picking criminals out of a police lineup.

The term 'Rashomon effect' refers to situations where observers give different accounts of the same event, and describes the effect of subjective perceptions on recollection. One explanation of this effect is that memory is reconstructed from traces encoded at the time it occurred, plus inferences based on knowledge, expectations, beliefs, and attitudes derived from other sources.  The knowledge that memory is to some extent confabulation has very serious implications for the use in the courtroom of eyewitness testimonies.

Robert Altman reflects on the film "Rashomon" by Kurosawa, which questions the veracity of perception. Altman observes that Japanese audiences will not see the film the same as the non-Japanese.

Although we've long imagined our memories as a stable form of information, a data file writ into the circuits of the brain, that persistence is an illusion. In reality, our recollections are always being altered, the details of the past warped by our present feelings and knowledge. The more you remember an event, the less reliable that memory becomes.

All our memories are reconstructed. They are the product of what we originally experienced and everything that has happened afterwards. The accuracy of our memoreis is not measured in how vivid they are nor how certain you are that they are correct.