Originally published by Hugo Munsterberg in 1908, this classic treatise applies experimental methods to the courtroom and is the foundational text of forensic psychology. With a new foreword by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus (author of Witness for the Defense, Eyewitness Testimony, and The Myth of Repressed Memory) the impact of this work continues to be felt a century after its initial publication. Topics in the book include: the memory of the witness, the detection of crime, untrue confessions, suggestions in court, hypnotism and crime, illusions, and the prevention of crime.

"The study of memory had become my specialty, my passion. In the next few years I wrote dozens of papers about how memory works and how it fails, but unlike most researchers studying memory, my work kept reaching out into the real world. To what extent, I wondered, could a person's memory be shaped by suggestion? When people witness a serious automobile accident, how accurate is their recollection of the facts? If a witness is questioned by a police officer, will the manner of questioning alter the representation of the memory? Can memories be supplemented with additional, false information?"

The "passion" Loftus describes in the lines above led her to a teaching career at the University of Washington and, perhaps more importantly, into hundreds of courtrooms as an expert witness on the fallibility of eyewitness accounts. As she has explained in numerous trials, and as she convincingly argues in this absorbing book, eyewitness accounts can be and often are so distorted that they no longer resemble the truth.