The Challenges of Eyewitness Testimony: Terrible Memories and Encoding

The biggest problem with eyewitness testimony is that our memories are terrible. Remembering the details of someone's face and trying to reconstruct it is really hard. Studies have shown that our confidence in remembering faces and describing them is undermined. Memory has two phases: encoding and retrieval. Encoding is when the brain writes down what it sees. Retrieval is pulling the memory back up later. After 30 minutes, most important details are forgotten.