Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Facundo Antonio Urreta Benitez | email: facu.urreta@gmail.com
Facundo A. Urreta Benitez 1°2°3°, Candela S. Leon 1°2°, Matías Bonilla 1°2°, Cecilia Forcato 1°2°
1° Laboratorio de Sueño y Memoria, Departamento de Ciencias de la vida, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA).
2° Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
3° Innocence Project Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
On June 14, 2008, a group of robbers entered a supermarket located in the province of Buenos Aires. The episode ended tragically, with the murder of one of the workers. A local man was tried for the crime and sentenced to life in prison. A decade later, his case was reopened thanks to the work of Innocence Project Argentina, revealing a series of errors in the judicial process, and leading to the release of the inmate. The Laboratorio de Sueño y Memoria team was invited to participate in the review of the case, analyzing from a neuroscientific perspective the validity of the lineups that concluded with the wrongful identification of the suspect. Here we discuss the analyses made in the light of current theories on the formation of false memories, memory updating through the reconsolidation process, memory forgetting and general errors in recognition.