By definition, eyewitness memory is visual. We see something happening at a crime scene, and we report it.

Yet a major potential for error turns up in that space between the image and the report.

Many visual details are lost relatively quickly from any given memory, resulting in our reporting only the brief gist of whatever we saw. For nearly a century, it has been known that even our personal beliefs can alter our memories (Bartlett, 1932; see Sharps, 2022).

These types of memory alteration, in the direction of gist, loss of detail, and personal belief, would be bad enough. Still, an additional problem arises because we must report our eyewitness's memories verbally.

A picture is supposedly worth a thousand words, but it's possible that those thousand words can result in a wildly inaccurate description of a given picture. One of the best historical examples of this may derive from one of the most infamous historical crimes in America, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas schoolbook depository in Dallas. One of the bullets that struck the President passed through his body and struck Texas Governor John Connally, who was sitting “in front” of the president in the presidential limousine. This bullet passed through the governor’s body, ultimately penetrating his leg.

Now, this so-called “magic bullet” has become infamous. In........

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