[1] Loftus's research includes the effects of phrasing on the perceptions of automobile crashes, the "lost in the mall" technique and the manipulation of food preferences through the use of false memories.

In the Jane Doe case that began in 1997, Loftus and Melvin J. Guyer revealed serious concerns about the background and validity of the initial research.

She has also served on the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and was a keynote speaker at the British Psychological Society's 2011 annual conference.

As well as her scientific work, Loftus has provided expert testimony or consultation for lawyers in over 300 court cases,[1] including for the legal teams of Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Ted Bundy, O. J. Simpson, Angelo Buono and Robert Durst.

[6]: Part II  Her thesis was entitled "An Analysis of the Structural Variables That Determine Problem-Solving Difficulty on a Computer-Based Teletype".

[8]: 2 From 1970 to 1973, Loftus was employed as a cognitive psychologist at the New School for Social Research in New York City,[8]: 17  after becoming dissatisfied with university work such as calibrating math and word problems for fifth-grade students.

[1][6]: Part II Around this time, the United States Department of Transportation was offering funding for research into car crashes.

[10] In 1974, Loftus published two articles with her observations about the conflicting eyewitness accounts in a particular murder trial and about the reliability of witness testimony in general.

The prosecution's evidence included eyewitness testimony from Franklin's daughter that she had witnessed the murder, based on a recovered memory which was unearthed during a therapy session a year before the trial.

[11][6]: Part IV In 1991 there were several high-profile court cases of people having recovered memories of having been molested by their parents, which gained Loftus's attention.

[6] A similar experiment by Loftus found that 25% of subjects believed that they could remember the event which had never taken place; however, this study was criticized by Lynn Crook and Martha Dean based on the ethics of the subject recruitment method used[13] and Kenneth Pope has argued she overgeneralized the findings to draw conclusions about false memories and therapeutic techniques.

[6]: Part IV  Also, Loftus had previously received death threats after the publication of her 1994 book The Myth of Repressed Memory.

[17] In the 1997 New Hampshire vs Joel Hungerford case, the judge set strict conditions on the admissibility of recovered memory testimony.

[50][51] In 2016, Loftus received the John Maddox Prize,[52] In 2018, she won the Western Psychological Association's Lifetime Achievement Award[53] and the University College Dublin's Ulysses Medal.

[57][58][59] Other scholars and specialists including Bessel van der Kolk, Lenore Terr, Jennifer Freyd and Linda Williams argue that there are well-documented cases of forgetting and later remembering traumatic events that occurred during childhood or adulthood by people in both clinical and non-clinical populations.

[64] The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) and the Eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) do not use the concept of repression but that of dissociative amnesia.

Dissociative amnesia is the forgetfulness due to psychological causes, including stress, of certain autobiographical events, which can cover short or long periods.

[65] In 1977 Florence Rush argued that Freud's theory about the Oedipus complex was created to cover up real cases of sexual abuse committed by adults against children.

According to this, Freud changed his initially posited seduction theory because he wanted to hide the reality of the traumas that his patients would have suffered.

[66][67] In 1984 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson published The Assault on Truth, where, like Rush, he argues that Freud covered up the reality of sexual abuse.

Freud changed his views and decided that his patients' memories of sexual abuse were actually imaginary, neurotic fantasies of unrealized events and Oedipal wishes.

[72] On the other hand, in addition to Elizabeth Loftus, several reputable modern psychologists and psychiatrists, including Ulric Neisser, Julia Shaw and Daniel Schacter agree that human memory is usually not true to the facts.