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General Science => General Science => Topic started by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 03/02/2022 14:24:33

Title: Why is eye witness testimony often notoriously unreliable?
Post by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 03/02/2022 14:24:33

I ask you

Title: Re: Why is eye witness testimony often notoriously unreliable?
Post by: Origin on 03/02/2022 15:49:58

Quote from: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 03/02/2022 14:24:33

I ask you

Because humans are not video recorders.

Title: Re: Why is eye witness testimony often notoriously unreliable?
Post by: evan_au on 04/02/2022 07:52:33

There is immense data compression between the light coming into your eyes, the data sent along the optic nerve, and what is stored in your memory.
- The scene you imagine in your brain as you see an event in real-time fills in and adds a lot more detail, eg:
      - you don't notice yourself blinking, but the world disappears for 100ms or so;
      - the whole world looks "high definition", but only the center of your field of view is high definition
      - what you see, and what is pertinent to you depends on your previous experiences
      - optical illusions reveal the many ways our brains can be subtly misled
- A similar amount of information must be added as you recall an event decompresses this information
- When your brain records a memory, it is not recorded on a "blank slate". It is stored on top of other memories, with links to previous events.
- Whenever you recall a memory, or have a similar event occur, or read a newspaper story about a similar event, your brain retrieves the original memory, modifies it with the new information, and writes it back.
- That is why I would not trust recollections recorded very long after the event.

Title: Re: Why is eye witness testimony often notoriously unreliable?
Post by: vhfpmr on 04/02/2022 14:17:32

Memory only stores salient points, not a recording of the facts. Some time ago the BBC made a program in which they hired an actor to pose as a thief robbing a pub which was suitably kitted out with hidden cameras. The landlord knew what was going to happen, but the staff and customers all thought it was a real incident. Afterwards they brought in the real police, and filmed them 'investigating' just as they would have done if it were all real.

The witness interviews were interesting to compare with the video of what happened....

People don't just fail to remember things correctly, they can very easily be made to remember things that never happened at all. Elizabeth Loftus is the expert on false memories: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elizabeth+loftus

Title: Re: Why is eye witness testimony often notoriously unreliable?
Post by: chiralSPO on 04/02/2022 19:39:43

This one blew my mind a few years back:

Title: Re: Why is eye witness testimony often notoriously unreliable?
Post by: Bored chemist on 05/02/2022 00:43:29

Quote from: chiralSPO on 04/02/2022 19:39:43

This one blew my mind a few years back:

That's truly remarkable.
As far as I can tell, the reason why "eye witness" evidence is poor is that, historically, we didn't need it to be good.
Anything that happened "yesterday" was something we already survived so it didn't matter if our recollection of it was "shaky"

Title: Re: Why is eye witness testimony often notoriously unreliable?
Post by: evan_au on 05/02/2022 10:04:04

“History is written by the survivors.”