ABSTRACT
To a surprising degree, verdicts in U.S. courtrooms depend on memory. In this chapter, the case of Jennifer (a student accused of cheating) is used to illustrate how the ordinary properties of memory can make the innocent appear guilty, and vice versa. Cherished truisms—for example, that witnesses who contradict themselves must be lying—are challenged by scientific data showing that false testimony may be more consistent than truthful testimony. As Jennifer's case unfolds, the reader is introduced to recent findings in false-memory research, including autosuggestion, external suggestion, forgetting and recovery of verbatim details, the mere-memory-testing effect, the false-memory persistence effect, and source misattribution, as well as constraints on suggestibility. The findings are explained in terms of fuzzy-trace theory, which assumes that gist and verbatim representations of events are remembered independently.
