Topic
Weapon focus
About: Weapon focus is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 69 publications have been published within this topic receiving 4726 citations.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
TL;DR: The possibility that emotional events receive some preferential processing mediated by factors related to early perceptual processing and late conceptual processing is discussed.
Abstract: The eyewitness literature often claims that emotional stress leads to an impairment in memory and, hence, that details of unpleasant emotional events are remembered less accurately than details of neutral or everyday events. A common assumption behind this view is that a decrease in available processing capacity occurs at states of high emotional arousal, which, therefore, leads to less efficient memory processing. The research reviewed here shows that this belief is overly simplistic. Current studies demonstrate striking interactions between type of event, type of detail information, time of test, and type of retrieval information. This article also reviews the literature on memory for stressful events with respect to two major theories: the Yerkes-Dodson law and Easter-brook's cue-utilization hypothesis. To account for the findings from real-life studies and laboratory studies, this article discusses the possibility that emotional events receive some preferential processing mediated by factors related to early perceptual processing and late conceptual processing.
1,150 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented subject-witnesses with a series of slides depicting an event in a fast-food restaurant, where half of the subjects saw a customer point a gun at the cashier; the other half saw him hand the cashiers a check.
Abstract: “Weapon focus” refers to the concentration of acrime witness's attention on a weapon, and the resultant reduction in ability to remember other details of the crime. We examined this phenomenon by presenting subject-witnesses with a series of slides depicting an event in a fast-food restaurant. Half of the subjects saw a customer point a gun at the cashier; the other half saw him hand the cashier a check. In Experiment 1, eye movements were recorded while subjects viewed the slides. Results showed that subjects made more eye fixations on the weapon than on the check, and fixations on the weapon were of a longer duration than fixations on the check. In Experiment 2, the memory of subjects in the weapon condition was poorer than the memory of subjects in the check condition: In Experiment 1 similar, though only marginally significant, performance effects were obtained. These results provide the first direct empirical support for weapon focus.
524 citations
TL;DR: There was considerable support for the hypothesis that high levels of stress negatively impact both types of eyewitness memory.
Abstract: In the past 30 years researchers have examined the impact of heightened stress on the fidelity of eyewitness memory. Meta-analyses were conducted on 27 independent tests of the effects of heightened stress on eyewitness identification of the perpetrator or target person and separately on 36 tests of eyewitness recall of details associated with the crime. There was considerable support for the hypothesis that high levels of stress negatively impact both types of eyewitness memory. Meta-analytic Z-scores, whether unweighted or weighted by sample size, ranged from -5.40 to -6.44 (high stress condition-low stress condition). The overall effect sizes were -.31 for both proportion of correct identifications and accuracy of eyewitness recall. Effect sizes were notably larger for target-present than for target-absent lineups, for eyewitness identification studies than for face recognition studies and for eyewitness studies employing a staged crime than for eyewitness studies employing other means to induce stress.
509 citations
TL;DR: In the first experiment, subjects viewed a mock crime scene in which a weapon was either highly visible or mostly hidden from view, and the second series of experiments tested the weapon focus effect in a non-emotional situation in which the time in view of both the weapon and the individual's face were manipulated as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Weapon focus refers to the decreased ability to give an accurate description of the perpetrator of a crime by an eyewitness because of attention to a weapon present during that crime. In the first experiment, subjects viewed a mock crime scene in which a weapon was either highly visible or mostly hidden from view. Subjects in the highly visible weapon group recalled significantly less feature information. Overall, memory accuracy scores were negatively correlated with self-reported arousal. The second series of experiments tested the weapon focus effect in a nonemotional situation in which the “time in view” of both the weapon and the individual's face were manipulated. A series of six slides were used in which either the weapon or the face was not in view for specific intervals within the sequence. The weapon focus effect was found to occur within a nonarousing, environmentally stark setting and was dependent on the percentage of time the weapon was visible.
190 citations
186 citations
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 2 |
| 2020 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2 |
| 2018 | 1 |
| 2017 | 5 |
| 2016 | 7 |