The weapon focus effect on memory for female versus male perpetrators
@article{Pickel2009TheWF, title={The weapon focus effect on memory for female versus male perpetrators}, author={Kerri L. Pickel}, journal={Memory}, year={2009}, volume={17}, pages={664 - 678} }
Previous research suggests that weapons are often inconsistent with the schema activated by eyewitnesses, which leads them to attend to weapons more than they would to neutral objects. Therefore an especially strong weapon focus effect should occur when a perpetrator holds an object primarily associated with the opposite rather than the same gender. As predicted, a handgun reduced the accuracy of witnesses’ descriptions of a female perpetrator more than descriptions of a male perpetrator…
20 Citations
The weapon focus effect is weaker with Black versus White male perpetrators
- PsychologyMemory
- 2018
It is proposed that observing an armed Black perpetrator automatically activates a stereotype linking Black men with weapons and crime, which in turn reduces the perceived unusualness of the weapon and thus its ability to attract attention.
Temporal shifts in weapon focus: Comparing retrograde and anterograde effects
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When an eyewitness suffers an impairment of memory for a criminal’s face because the criminal used a weapon during the commission of the crime, this impairment is called the weapon focus effect.…
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We examined the effects of acute alcohol on eyewitness memory for a simulated armed robbery under laboratory conditions. Alcohol and placebo participants viewed a slide series showing a target male…
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Abstract Weapon focus is frequently cited as a factor in eyewitness testimony, and is broadly defined as a weapon-related decrease in performance on subsequent tests of memory for those elements of…
The Weapon Focus Effect for Person Identifications and Descriptions: A Meta-analysis
- Psychology
- 2016
In many crimes involving a weapon, witnesses report difficulties remembering the face of the perpetrator. In the current meta-analysis, we synthesized tests of the hypothesis that the presence of a…
The Weapon Focus Effect in Target‐Present and Target‐Absent Line‐Ups: The Roles of Threat, Novelty, and Timing
- Psychology
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Summary
When an eyewitness suffers an impairment of memory for a perpetrator because the criminal used a weapon during the crime, this impairment is called the weapon focus effect. The literature is…
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- Psychology
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There is a mass of research literature providing evidence for the ‘Weapon Focus’ effect which although traditionally accounted for in terms of an Arousal explanation, underpinned by Easterbrook’s…
Armed and attentive: Holding a weapon can bias attentional priorities in scene viewing
- PsychologyAttention, perception & psychophysics
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Evidence confirms that the action capabilities of the observer alter more than just perceptual mechanisms and that holding a weapon can change attentional priorities.
A Synthetic Perspective on the Own-Race Bias in Eyewitness Identification
- Psychology
- 2016
Perceivers show worse memory for other-race than own-race faces. Much of the interest in this own-race bias (ORB) stems from the problems that it may introduce in eyewitness misidentification. Here…
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