Author Archives: Devin Lindsay Greco

What can go Wrong with Eyewitness Accounts

Our justice system is something that makes our country unique.  Everybody gets a right to a fair trial, and everyone is judged by a jury of their own peers.  It is our civic duty to serve our time as jurors, and it is something that is the absolute foundation of our entire justice system.  This is the short summary of a speech that was given to me and my fellow jurors on my jury selection day.  Although I do agree with what the judge said to us, having taken a few Psychology courses by now, I know it is not this simple and clean-cut.  Human memory is faulty, and as a result, many innocent people are sent to prison for crimes they did not commit.

The American Judicature Society Center for Forensic Science and Public Policy, in collaboration with the Innocence Project, the Police Foundation, and the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, have been examining eyewitness identification procedures in the field, namely the reliability of simultaneous versus sequential lineups administered under double-blind conditions using laptop computers.  The group recently released a study analyzing more than 850 police lineups collected from four sites, the Austin (TX) Police Department, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (NC) Police Department, the Tucson (AZ) Police Department, and the San Diego (CA) Police Department.  We'll discuss the study findings and how SDPD will change its practices based on the results.

(http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/sep/26/sdpd-change-lineup-practices/)

            Something used as evidence in many cases is the eyewitness account.  There are quite a few reasons why this is not as reliable as most people think.  The entire witnessing process can be broken down into three parts: acquisition, storage, and retrieval (Aronson, 434).  The acquisition stage takes place when the crime takes place.  It involves the witness perceiving what is going on around them (Aronson, 434).  Many problems interfere with this first stage.  The witness at this point is most likely feeling a lot of stress, making it difficult to pay attention to details of the crime scene (like the criminals height or eye color) (Aronson, 435).  A common phenomena that happens at this point is called “weapons focus” (Goldstein, 227).  Basically, if you are a witness to a mugging on the street, and you see that the mugger is pointing a loaded gun, you are most likely to focus on the gun rather than other details of the scene (Goldstein, 227).

The next phase, storage, is the part where the information from the acquisition phase is stored to memory (Aronson, 434).  The possibilities for error in this stage include things like suggestive questions from police officers, and source monitoring errors.  A source monitoring error occurs when you remember information you learned after the event as being a part of the actual event (Wede, lesson 9).  You are trying to find the correct source of the memory.  A police officer’s question may very well ‘change’ the memory of an eyewitness (“Was the suspect driving the red van?”).

The last part, “retrieval,” is when the witness “recalls information stored in their memories” (Aronson, 434).  This is a critical stage as it is when the witness is usually asked to pick the suspect in a lineup.  Most people feel that if an eye witness identifies a man in a line up as being guilty, he must be guilty; however, there are some problems with this belief.  One of the main problems is that the witness believes that the actual perpetrator is in the lineup, when a lot of the time he is not.  This leads the witness to give their “best guess” for who they believe to look the most like their memory (Aronson, 438).  Obviously, this can end with an innocent person serving time for a crime they did not commit.

 

 

(http://keenetrial.com/blog/2012/11/14/when-i-dont-know-improves-the-accuracy-of-eye-witness-identification/)

            No matter how certain you are that you are right about something you saw, science says there’s a chance that you’re not.  The situation in which you observe your surroundings, the people who speak to you afterwards, and the way you recall the information after time has passed can all influence the information itself.  Knowing a little bit about how our memories may trick us can better help you to make your decisions the day you are in a juror’s chair.  You may even be the one on the witness stand!

 

 

RESOURCES:

Aronson, Elliot, et al. Social Psychology. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2013. Print.

Goldstein, Bruce, E. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. 3rd ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2011. Print.

Wede, Joshua. “Lesson 9: Everyday Memory and Memory Errors.” PYCH 256: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology. Penn State University, 17 April. 2014. <https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp14/psych256/001/content/10_lesson/08_page.html>

Feeling Neglected

 

What do you notice about the pictures below?

Drawing of scene

(http://www.acbrown.com/neuro/Lectures/Assc/NrAsscPrtl.htm )

Obviously, the “copies” of the original drawings are incomplete.  More specifically, they are missing their left halves.  This is an effect of a condition called contralateral neglect, which is a result of damages/lesions to the right parietal lobe (Wede, 2014).  Victims of this condition unconsciously neglect the world to their left.  This lack of attention spans from drawings like the ones above, to bathing only one side of the body, eating only half of a plate of food, and brushing only one side of teeth within the mouth (Wede, 2014).

 

(http://www.neuroskills.com/brain-injury/parietal-lobes.php)

Aside from receiving sensory information such as touch and temperature, the parietal lobe is responsible for visual tasks, such as mapping (Anon., 2014).  The visual/mapping skills pertain more so to the right parietal lobe, which is where contralateral neglect comes into play.  Along with visually mapping our surroundings, the parietal lobe also maps out our bodies (Freudenrich, Boyd, 2001).   It is this that allows us to know if something is touching us, an instant description of this something (sharp, hot, wet, etc), and most importantly in this case, where it is touching us.

When our brain cannot receive proper sensory information from the left side of the body, it is as if the left side does not exist; this leads contralateral neglect sufferers to behave as such, in ways like those relayed above (Anon., 2001).  To summarize an example given by British neurologist W. R. Brain, subjects now known to have suffered from contralateral neglect would frequently get lost in their own homes.  They would repeatedly make right turns throughout hallways, or choose to enter/exit doors only on their rights (Anon., 2001 [Brain, 1941]).  According to Brain’s research, some people can acknowledge the existence of the left sides of their bodies, while others live in denial of its existence due to lack of sensory “evidence.”

The following is a series of paintings done by stroke sufferer Anton Raederscheidt, who displayed neglect.  You can see the improvement in his spatial skills through his self-portraits over time (Anon., 2001).

(www.ib.cnea.gov.ar)

Contralateral neglect deals not only with attentional processing, but also displays what we call localization of function, or how “specific functions are served by specific areas of the brain” (Goldstein, 29).  The fact that damage to a specific area (in this case, the right parietal lobe) causes consistent results (neglecting the left half of the world, no sensory information received from left half of body, poor mapping skills) demonstrates exactly what localization defines.  This condition also provides insight into how the brain processes the objects we attend to.  It has been acknowledged across a number of studies that many areas of the brain are involved with attentional processing, and “attentional processing enhances neural responses” (Wede, 2014).  Basically, even though visual information may be attended to by areas all over the brain, the right parietal lobe seems to be of extreme importance in this realm.

The right parietal lobe within the brain is responsible for receiving sensory information like touch, along with mapping out visual information we receive.  This mapping ability not only applies to our surroundings, but also to the different parts of our bodies.  When the right parietal lobe is damaged, our spatial and sensory knowledge becomes less accurate.  Known as contralateral neglect, this condition causes its victims to mind only the right side of the world, neglecting the left side of the body and surrounding area.  This bizarre condition provides evidence for localization of function within the brain, and gives us more interest in learning about the power and complexity which exists inside of our own bodies.

 

RESOURCES

Anon. “Lesions of the Parietal Association Cortex: Deficits of Attention” NCBI 2001 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10998/ >

Anon. “Parietal Lobes” Centre for Neuro Skills 2014 <http://www.neuroskills.com/brain-injury/parietal-lobes.php>

Wede, Joshua. “Physiological Underpinnings of Attentional Processing” Psych256: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology 2014     <https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp14/psych256/001/content/05_lesson/12_page.html>

Goldstein, Bruce E. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Belmont: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011, 2008.

Freudenrich, Ph.D., Craig, and Robynne Boyd.  “How Your Brain Works” HowStuffWorks.com. 06 June 2001.  <http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/brain.htm>

Illusions in Aviation

Something that I have always enjoyed growing up were optical, or as they are now known, “visual illusions.”  The word “optical” has been replaced because it is not our eyes that are deceiving us, but our brains that are misleading us (Nierenberg).  For many, illusions are something fun to do to pass the time, but what if they were something more powerful than that?  What if you were taught to recognize certain illusions before getting a job?  For airplane pilots, that’s par for the course.

While in training, pilots are taught to recognize some common visual illusions encountered while flying (Nierenberg). One of these, called the “false horizon” illusion, happens when a poorly lit ground blends seamlessly with the sky or Earth at a higher altitude (Watson).  An example of this illusion is provided below.

A false horizon

(http://aeromedical.org/Articles/a&l.html)

            As you can see from the drawing, the pilot may think the horizon is lower (or higher) than it actually is!  This has to do with the way our brain perceives the world around us.  When looking at the middle slide of this picture (“what the pilot will see”), the pilot’s eyes observe the grid of city lights at night, paired with a jet-black sky…or at least what he thinks is a sky.  When our brains receive visual information from our eyes, that information immediately gets processed so we can understand what it is we are looking at.  Since it is all too common for a pilot to see a landscape just under the sky, his brain will use “heuristics,” or shortcuts, to deduce that “the big, dark space hanging over that land must be the sky.”  As you can see, without proper training, this scenario could end poorly.

Another illusion pilots encounter is called the “black hole illusion,” or “black hole approach.”  This happens on clear nights, when the desired runway is located in a dark area with “…no lighting or visual cues” (Aviation Knowledge).   In this scenario, the runway looks a lot closer than it really is, causing the pilot to descend the aircraft too early.  This may result in the plane touching down miles before the runway (Pendleton)!  To a pilot, the illusion may look similar to this:

runway_light.jpg

(http://aviationknowledge.wikidot.com/aviation:in-flight-visual-illusions)

             Another illusion pilots face is called the “blind spot,” (Aviation Knowledge) and you can experience it with your own eyes right now!  Below is an image from pilotfriend.com used to demonstrate this process.  This illusion tests the blind spot of the right eye, so the first thing to do is cover your left eye.  Position your face at a distance three or four times the size of the red line.  Now, look at each letter one at a time.  What happens?

         The black dot vanishes!  Everyone has a blind spot in each eye.  When flying, if a pilot is focusing on an object ahead, they may miss another aircraft approaching from a nearby area (Aviation Knowledge). 

The fact that recognizing these (and more) illusions is part of this job description proves just how powerful they can be.  They can affect how/when the pilot lands a plane, or whether or not they notice an incoming aircraft.  They occur when our brains incorrectly interpret what exactly we are seeing.  Learning about the types of illusions we encounter can help us to recognize them, and may keep us out of trouble!

 

REFERENCES:

Nierenberg, Carl, “Optical Illusions: When Your Brain Can’t Believe Your Eyes,” ABC NEWS, October 13, 2009, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/EyeHealth/optical-illusions-eye-brain-agree/story?id=8455573&singlePage=true

Watson, Dougal, “Spatial orientation and disorientation during flight: Illusions during the approach and landing,” http://aeromedical.org/Articles/a&l.html

Pattenden, R., “In-Flight Visual Illusions,” Aviation Knowledge, http://aviationknowledge.wikidot.com/aviation:in-flight-visual-illusions

Pendleton, Linda D., “The Black Hole Approach: Don’t Get Sucked In!” April 5th, 2000, http://www.avweb.com/news/airman/182402-1.html?redirected=1

Anon., “The Anatomical Blind Spot,” http://www.pilotfriend.com/aeromed/medical/fovea.htm