A Texas rape victim, who discovered that she misidentified her attacker nine years after his death in prison, has decided to study the science of human memory. From The Dallas Morning News:
Michele Mallin said she was "100 percent sure" when she identified Timothy Brian Cole as the man who raped her.
Her resolve never wavered, Ms. Mallin said, until she learned last May that DNA testing had invalidated her 1985 identification. The revelation came nearly nine years after Mr. Cole died at 39 in a Texas prison from an asthma attack.
"I was more shocked than I think I had ever been in my entire life," Ms. Mallin said during a recent lawyers workshop in Fort Worth
More than two decades after she quit Texas Tech University because of the rape in Lubbock, Ms. Mallin, 43, is trying to educate herself on the science of human memory and what it can tell her about the tenuousness of eyewitness identifications.
She is learning what some social psychologists have preached for more than a century: A crime victim's memory is fleeting and often faulty.
The problem starts with how the mind commits faces to memory. Researchers compare the process to piecing together the visual images a camera would capture.
"It's really a process of construction and reconstruction," said Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a leading memory researcher at the University of California at Irvine.
The human eye collects information in what Dr. Loftus, a psychology professor, called "fixations" that last a fraction of a second. "Even though it feels to us like a movie camera, actually we are taking in the world in a series of eye fixations," she said.
Memory of those original images is subject "not only to decay, but to contamination and distortion" from outside influences, Dr. Loftus said. She gave the example of a witness being fed false information about the person who was identified.
"Then you're going to think that's the guy, rehearse the face in your story, and pretty soon you can develop a strong memory that that's the person even though it isn't," she said.
The memory process works well when someone is shown a face repeatedly. But when the exposure is episodic, "we end up with the gist" of a person's looks, said Dr. Gary Wells, a nationally known expert on eyewitness testimony and a professor of psychology at Iowa State University.
H/T: How Appealing.
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