Professor, Psychology
Mark Reinitz is an expert in memory errors, attention, and visual perception. He regularly is called on as an expert witness in crime trials involving evidence that is based on memory. His teaching and research revolve around memory, sensation, perception, and cognitive neuroscience. He has explored the reliability of memory as it relates to familiarity, recollection, and confidence, and he has analyzed studies of false memories. Reinitz specifically has explored whether confidence is a good predictor of the accuracy of memories; whether the memory of a particular feature or just a sense of familiarity with a face leads to more accurate memories; and how people can create the illusion of a memory by making inferences from one piece of evidence that they did see. He has published more than 20 articles in professional journals, including “False memories for compound words: Role of working memory,” in Memory & Cognition, and the co-written “Conjunction faces alter confidence-accuracy relations for old faces” in Journal of Experimental Psychology (2016). He has also been involved with the Innocence Project, which aims to exonerate the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and criminal justice system reforms. His doctoral degree is in experimental psychology.