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Basically, this is talking about research on the unreliability of eyewitness memory. And there is a pretty big body of evidence suggesting that our memories get corrupted over time, can be corrupted further by police investigation processes, aren’t always great indicators of objective fact, and are also likely to come out of an interrogation less accurate than they went in.
I’ve been doing some background reading on this, but I’m not sure I can weigh in in a comprehensive way just this moment, largely because a lot of the studies on this aren’t super consistent with the case at hand. Studies are often looking at witness ability to pick an assailant out of a lineup, for instance. And there are ways those specific environments can corrupt memory that wouldn’t really apply here. Other research is about two people remembering the same sexual encounter differently — one as consensual and one not. That also might not be exactly applicable. So I’d like to do more research into this before I really answer. But I will say this, if we’re talking about the unreliability of eyewitness memory, that effect would certainly apply to Kavanaugh’s testimony about these events, as well.