Eyewitness testimony and the malleability of memory
A. Memory does not work like a video recorder: People do not encode
or retrieve every aspect of an event perfectly.
B. What a person encodes depends on his or her priorities, his or her
past experience, his or her expectations, and the current demands.
C. W hat people remember about an event can also depend on what
happened after the event, their biases and expectations, and reports
from others.
D. Biases at encoding: When arousal (state of alertness) is high,
people tend to narrow their focus to only certain aspects of an
event.