Elizabeth F. Loftus

Photo by Matthew Brandt

“Many people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn’t true. Our memories are constructive. They’re reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.”

Elizabeth F. Loftus, “How Reliable Is Your Memory?”
​TEDGlobal 2013. To watch the full talk, visit TED.com.

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Elizabeth F. Loftus (1944), an expert on human memory, has been recognized as the most influential female psychologist of the twentieth century. Her paradigm-shifting experiments revealed that memory is malleable, influenced by later suggestions, information, and imagination. Her work on eyewitness memory, false and recovered memory, and the impact of misinformation has made her a key consultant in hundreds of legal cases, including for many high-profile defendants. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

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