ABSTRACT
A clear view of the past is second in value only to a clear view of the future. No one who has struggled with the detailed reconstruction of past events needs to be convinced of this. Recent developments in memory research and eyewitness identification provide means of improving the recollection of past events. This chapter describes some of these developments. There are some important points that should be acknowledged from the beginning. First, the psychological study of memory is a mature field of scientific scholarship, with a body of theoretical and empirical literature extending back more than a century (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964). But it is not a dead area of science. It is under continual development— an area of scholarship with its own controversies, like all other areas of scientific inquiry.
