Approaches to Testimony

This chapter develops an ecological and social approach to testimony as an everyday memory practice. It first analyzes the nature of this practice through a history of psychological testimony for more than a century. In recent decades, two approaches to testimony have been dominant: the cognitive and the discursive one, each with its own problems. A hint at a new theory exists in Neisser’s classic study of “John Dean’s memory.” Neisser introduced the concept of “repisodic memory,” roughly defining this concept as representatives or common characteristics of a series of events, in contrast to “episodic memory,” which refers to the representation of a single event. The chapter examines the concept and integrates it with Gibson’s ecological perspective of perception and Bartlett’s schema theory in a synthesis that combines the two approaches. The validity of the new theory is demonstrated by referring to practical and experimental studies that have been performed.