Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Forgetting The Once-Seen Face: Estimating The Strength Of An Eyewitness’S Memory Representation, Kenneth A. Deffenbacher, Brian H. Bornstein, E. Kiernan Mcgorty, Steven D. Penrod

Psychology Faculty Publications

The fidelity of an eyewitness’s memory representation is an issue of paramount forensic concern. Psychological science has been un¬able to offer more than vague generalities concerning the relation of retention interval to memory trace strength for the once-seen face. A meta-analysis of 53 facial memory studies produced a highly reliable association (r = .18, d = 0.37) between longer retention intervals and positive forgetting of once-seen faces, an effect equally strong for both face recognition and eyewitness identification studies. W. A. Wick¬elgren’s (1974, 1975, 1977) theory of recognition memory provided statistically satisfactory fits to 11 different empirical forgetting func¬tions. Applied …