The outcome of many court cases rely on eyewitness identification, which in criminal law, is evidence received from a witness “who has actually seen an event and can so testify in court”. In recent years many US Courts have noted on the inherently suspect qualities of eyewitness identification evidence, and described the evidence as “notoriously unreliable”. In the United Kingdom, the Criminal Law Review Committee stated that cases of mistaken identification "constitute by far the greatest cause of actual or possible wrong convictions".
In many of these cases the persons providing the eyewitness accounts were convinced of what they saw. So how is it possible that mistaken identities can occur from people who actually saw what happen?
The Visual Pathway
The answer lies in the fact that vision is a complicated process that requires numerous components of the human eye and brain to work together. The visual system is the most complex neural circuitry of all the sensory systems in the human body with the optic nerve alone containing over a million nerve fibres.
What humans perceive as vision starts with light rays being focused clearly and accurately on to the back of the eye on an area called the retina. Interestingly the image focused on the retina is inverted relative to the actual object. This means that what we perceive as upright is actually focused upside down on the retina.
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