ABSTRACT
The empirical study of human memory is 115 years old, dating from Ebbinghaus’s (1885/1964) pioneering investigations. Throughout most of the history of the study of memory, investigators focused on factors that affect accurate remembering: repetition of information, spacing of repetitions, retention interval, types of material, retrieval cues, and dozens more. Researchers have usually assessed accurate responding on memory tests or they have measured forgetting, typically defined as omissions of response on tests as a function of delay. Researchers rarely provided systematic investigations of various errors in memory, although a few early studies examined errors (see Roediger, 1996; Schacter, 1995, for the history of memory distortion research). It has only been relatively recently (since about 1970) that experimental psychologists began the systematic investigation of errors of memory. We may refer to memory illusions as occurring when people remember events quite differently from the way they originally happened or, in the most dramatic case, remembering events that never happened at all (Roediger, 1996). The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of factors affecting both veridical and illusory memories that may be relevant for forensic purposes.
