Memory. There may be nothing more important to human beings than our ability to enshrine experience and recall it. While philosophers and poets have elevated memory to an almost mystical level, psychologists have struggled to demystify it. Now, according to Daniel Schacter, one of the most distinguished memory researchers, the mysteries of memory are finally yielding to dramatic, even revolutionary, scientific breakthroughs. Schacter explains how...

In this intriguing study, Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter explores the memory miscues that occur in everyday life, placing them into seven categories: absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Illustrating these concepts with vivid examples-case studies, literary excerpts, experimental evidence, and accounts of highly visible news events such as the O. J. Simpson verdict, Bill Clinton's...

This work offers an overview of our understanding of children's and adults' eyewitness capabilities. The authors provide an insight into the social, cognitive, developmental and legal factors that affect the accuracy and quality of information obtained in forensic interviews.

Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept...

Tom Bedford has put his past behind him--until his son Danny is charged with murder. In the chaos of war, Danny has been caught in a violent skirmish gone bloodily awry, and the Army needs someone to pay for the mistake. Shocked into action, Tom confronts the violence in his past and fights to save the son he'd let slip away.

"In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles in the back pages of her exercise book, thrilling to the first sparks of her own inventiveness. As she grows, she becomes one on whom nothing is lost. Not the novels an eccentric customer slips her at the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, or the indelible outline of the careening creature himself. Not the growing heaps of books in which she loses-and finds-herself....

In 1974 Wales, thirteen-year-old Petra and her best friend Sharon are madly in love with David Cassidy and enter a contest whose winners will be flown to America to meet him. In 1998 London, Petra is on the brink of a divorce. While cleaning out her mother's closet, she finds the letter her mother intercepted declaring her the winner of the Cassidy contest. After 24 years, the girls head to Las Vegas to meet their teen idol.

Doug Billings and Tracy Garner are about to get married. Two days before the wedding, Doug and his groomsmen hop into Tracy's father's Mercedes for a 24-hour stag party in Las Vegas. The morning after their arrival in Vegas, they awaken in their Caesars Palace hotel suite each with the worst hangover. No one remembers what happened in the past twelve or so hours. The suite is in shambles and Doug is missing. Phil, Stu and Alan try to find Doug using...

Tim is a man who is still haunted by traumatic memories of his past, many linked to the death of his father. Desperate to resolve his nightmarish issues, Tim returns to his old hometown so he can pay a visit to the house where he grew up. But while Tim wants to convince himself that the ghostly memories he carries are just a figment of his imagination, circumstances lead him to believe that there may be a kernel of truth to them.

Angelenos Doug Billings and Tracy Garner are about to get married. Two days before the wedding, Doug and his groomsmen hop into Tracy's father's Mercedes for a 24-hour stag party in Las Vegas. The morning after their arrival in Vegas, they awaken in their Caesars Palace hotel suite each with the worst hangover. No one remembers what happened in the past twelve or so hours. The suite is in shambles and Doug is missing. Phil, Stu and Alan try to find...