John T. Wixted

In 2011 Wixted received the field's highest honor--the Warren Medal--for his work on the basic underlying mechanisms of recognition memory. That award-wining research has, if anything, been surpassed by his more recent research on how recognition memory operates in the real world. His findings, which overturned deeply entrenched ideas about the reliability of eyewitness identification, are already influencing how police departments conduct lineups and how judges and juries interpret eyewitness confidence, thereby helping the criminal justice system to achieve both of its fundamental goals: to exonerate the innocent and to incriminate the guilty.