If you are at the same place where a criminal is and you see them run off with a lady's purse, do you think you would be able to tell a police officer what the thief looked like? Reporting what you saw to the police is called an eyewitness account. An eyewitness account is telling someone, like a police officer, exactly what you saw during a crime or other event. This report would include information such as what the thief looked like and what you saw him or her do. Although accurately telling the officers what happened may seem easy, your eyewitness account can have mistakes. For example, in eyewitness accounts, people sometimes report that a criminal is taller than they actually are in real life. Such error is a problem because police work can rely on eyewitness accounts to help solve some crimes. In order to understand why such eyewitness account errors happen, first we need to understand the stages of memory.

License information: CC BY 4.0
MPAA: PG
Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2018.00021