Tense Shifting

Watch carefully for unexplained shifts in verb tense. Someone recounting a real memory often stays in past tense, but truthful speakers can shift tense too, especially when a story feels vivid. A tense shift is a cue to ask more, not a lie detector.

Example: "I walked to the store and I buy some groceries." A tense shift like this can be a spot worth a follow-up question, where recall may be drifting into reconstruction. But tense also shifts for innocent reasons, so it is a prompt to clarify, not proof of fabrication.