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Yantis and Jonides tested whether attention is drawn automatically to a new visual object or whether apparent capture results from masking effects. Their experiments found that targets appearing abruptly in previously blank locations receive a processing advantage, supporting temporal precedence of new objects as an explanation for attentional capture.
This review assesses competing explanations for the cross-race effect, the tendency for people to recognize same-race faces more accurately than other-race faces. Young and colleagues compare perceptual-expertise accounts with social and motivational explanations, reviewing evidence about face encoding, experience, categorization, and the conditions that can strengthen or reduce the recognition difference.
In this chapter, the author recounts a case involving alleged recovered memories and explains how ordinary memory can change through reconstruction, forgetting, and source confusion. The chapter contrasts these processes with proposed forms of trauma-related amnesia and questions therapeutic methods such as hypnosis and guided imagery as means of recovering accurate memories.
This chapter reviews disputed claims that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered, and considers how recovered-memory testimony has been treated in court. The authors discuss research on memory distortion and suggestibility, therapeutic practices that may shape recollections, and questions for evaluating a claimant’s account, including its context and possible corroboration.
Schaaf, Alexander, and Goodman studied how repeated questioning affects young children’s reports of true and false events, varying question order and event valence. Their study of 82 children ages 3 and 5 found that age, valence, and whether an event was true predicted reports, while children’s inhibitory ability and behavioral problems also related to inaccurate information.
Steblay’s meta-analysis of 19 tests found that weapon presence was associated with lower lineup identification accuracy, with a small mean effect. In a separate analysis of 10 studies measuring memory for the perpetrator’s features, weapon presence was associated with a moderate reduction in feature accuracy.
This National Institute of Justice guide sets out recommended practices for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence during investigations. Its sections cover first response, witness interviews, showups, and suspect identification, emphasizing nonsuggestive questioning, careful documentation, and procedures designed to reduce mistaken identifications.
Wells and Quigley-McBride review how eyewitness-identification research has informed legal and police practices, focusing on recommendations from a 1998 American Psychology-Law Society white paper. They discuss lineup composition, double-blind administration, instructions that the suspect may be absent, immediate confidence statements, and a proposed reasonable-suspicion threshold before conducting an identification procedure.
Fawcett and colleagues use meta-analysis to test explanations for weapon focus, the reduction in memory for scene details associated with a weapon’s presence. They find an overall effect and report that its size varies with retention interval, exposure duration, and threat, while their analyses found no difference by laboratory, simulated, or real-world setting.
Finkel describes how clinicians can obtain a child’s history in a developmentally appropriate, nonjudgmental interview and use it to form a balanced, defensible opinion in a suspected sexual abuse evaluation. The article explains how a consultative report should address physical findings, symptoms in relation to timing, and discrepancies between the child’s account and examination results.
