people watched a thirty-second video of a bank robbery. Twenty minutes later, half of the subjects were given five minutes to write down what they saw. The other half were kept busy for an equivalent amount of time on an unrelated task. Then, everyone was asked to pick out the bank robber from a lineup. Among the nonwriters, 61 percent picked out the robber, but only 27 percent of the writers did. Note that not even a half hour later, at best only about two-thirds of people who witnessed the bank robbery could remember correctly what the robber looked like. And writing about what they had seen
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