Eyewitnesses have been used for many critical convicted crimes over the years and are a formidable tool in a crime to catch the guilty party. As an eyewitness, you remember what you saw and provide a description of the event. While these testimonials are helpful, they also result in a number of complications. Our memory is so resourceful, yet there are many details that can mix with what the eyewitness initially saw. Furthermore, memory is subject to our unconscious memory and can also be distorted by partial visions or an involuntarily clouded memory. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay We learned in class that memories are not 100% accurate. Memories are rough reconstructions of the past that may be distorted or include details that didn't actually happen. One of the first problems arising from eyewitness testimony is reconstructive memories. There are many cases where this memory has interfered with eyewitness testimony. Loftus, a well-known researcher and psychologist, with her colleague Jacqueline Pickrell, conducted a study on ordinary individuals. They wanted to see whether, by providing three true and one false event statements, the individual would remember the false one or not. Furthermore, they brought in the subject's relatives and agreed with the false story, adding the description of their whereabouts. Next, subjects wrote more details about the event or said whether they remembered it clearly, vaguely, or not at all. An impressive one-third actually said they remembered this event that never actually happened (Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E, 1995, p. 14). He then stated that in two follow-up interviews, 25% of individuals reported that they still vividly remembered the untrue event. There have been many other studies that have had the same results, showing that it is possible for a person to create a false memory for the eyewitness and make them believe that this event actually happened. As a result, memory is very malleable and can be easily changed through retroactive interference (new information is overshadowed by old) and even through proactive interference (old information overshadows new information). Also, suggestibility is a huge factor because by saying "yeah, good job" to the witness and then putting false information into his brain telling him that it happened, most will eventually believe that it's true or that he's right. When an eyewitness sees a perpetrator committing a crime, they immediately begin to pay attention and examine the information or act they are seeing, this is an encoding process. Coding is very useful because it represents the first acquisition of information. There are different ways of coding, probably the two most used at the crime scene would be visual and auditory. Visual coding is the process of coding images into images that the brain retains, usually this type of coding goes into short-term and then long-term memory. As intriguing as it may seem, seeing something and creating a mental image at a crime scene is quite challenging, especially because of all the trauma the person is enduring. “Eyewitness memory can also be affected by stress induced by a criminal event, which can negatively influence the encoding of relevant stimuli by elevating psychophysiological responses” (Deffenbacher, Bornstein, Penrod, & McGorty, 2004). Although it is not fully proven, whether the suspect.