A brief account of an actual case illustrates the three phases: the descriptive phase (eliciting information from the eyewitness), the search phase (relating obtained information to criminal records and to recollections of other witnesses), and the identification phase (evaluating the witness' selection of a perpetrator from a lineup). This article studies factors of each of the three phases, including verbal descriptions, visual representations, police artists, composite systems, social psychology perspectives, structural perspectives, cognitive perspectives, and voice identification. In a 1980 study of voice identification, of the subjects who were not informed of a subsequent voice-memory test, only 62 percent were accurate. A 1982 study found that earwitness accuracy declined from 49 percent at one week after the event to 8 percent at three weeks. 123 references.