Australian science prize awarded to researcher studying memory accuracy of domestic violence survivors

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“What our research shows is that compared to a single-event witness, a repeated-event witness tends to report more gist-like details, the overall details of what typically would happen, and the things that remain constant between the episodes,” said Helen Paterson, an associate professor in forensic psychology at the University of Sydney. “Sometimes they confuse one episode with another.”

Paterson’s work has also found that repeated-event witnesses are perceived to be “less honest, less cognitively competent, and less overall credible than the single-event witnesses – which is pretty concerning that the more repeatedly you are victimised, the less credible you appear to others”.

"in trial, it’s defence 101 to say … they’ve made this inconsistency, therefore their whole memory is unreliable,”