Could you identify a criminal? It’s harder than you think

If you witnessed someone committing a crime, how confident would you be that you could correctly identify that person later on? As it turns out, studies consistently reveal that we tend to overestimate our ability to recall past events accurately and recognise people we think we have seen before. A 2011 United States study showed that a majority of participants (63 per cent) believe that human memory works like a video recording.

What an eyewitness is doing, on this view, is akin to running back...