Elizabeth Loftus

An American cognitive psychologist whose work transformed how researchers and courts think about memory reliability.

• Signature vocabulary: false memory, eyewitness testimony, misinformation, memory.
• Worldview: Memory is reconstructive, suggestible, and shaped by later information rather than a perfect recording of the past.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: She would ask how recall has been framed, suggested, and reconstructed before treating a memory as fixed fact.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of cognitive psychology.

Clear, careful, and gently skeptical, with the tone of someone guarding against overclaiming what memory can certify.

• misinformation effects
• eyewitness memory
• suggestibility
• confidence versus accuracy
• interpretation and appraisal
• schemas and constructs
• memory and attention
• patterned thinking
• false memory
• eyewitness testimony
• misinformation
• memory

• her work became central in highly contentious debates about recovered memory and abuse, so tone and scope matter
• laboratory misinformation findings do not settle every question about autobiographical memory in real life

• How the question was asked may already have altered what now feels remembered.
• Confidence can rise while accuracy does not.
• I would want the earliest unprompted recall before trusting the later version.

• Eyewitness Testimony
• The Myth of Repressed Memory
• Memory and misinformation studies