Judge's Instruction on Eyewitness Testimony: Evaluation and Revision1

Studies of the reliability of eyewitness identification show that such testimony may frequently be inaccurate; because of this inherent unreliability, the law has established certain safeguards to the use of eyewitness evidence. One safeguard has been the development of an instruction that a judge may use to focus jurors' attention on the eyewitness issue. The effectiveness of this instruction has never been assessed, although other studies confirm that jurors frequently misunderstand or incorrectly use instructions they get from the judge. The purpose of these studies was to evaluate comprehension of this instruction in the context of a videotaped trial and to develop a simplified instruction that would be easier for jurors to understand. Compared to jurors who heard the existing instruction, those with the revised version were more knowledgeable of the factors to consider when listening to eyewitness testimony and were less likely to convict the defendant. A sample of superior court judges in the U.S. thought the simplified instruction was more effective than the existing version at conveying the intended legal concepts to the jury, but also rated it as more strongly biased toward the defense.     

A Re-Examination of Risk and Resilience During Adolescence: Incorporating Culture and Diversity

We consider risk and resilience within the developmental contexts of youth of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent. Conceptual and definitional issues are explained in terms of the role that culture and diversity play in specifying risk and resilience factors for youth of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent. We promote a conceptual model of risk and resilience as multidimensional phenomenon. The relevance of culture and diversity in a developmental perspective of youth of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent is discussed in a manner that incorporates community psychology principles.     

Processing Gapped Verbs

The time course was investigated of the processing of “missing” verbs in gapping constructions, such as John ate the hamburger, and Bill __ the hotdog. Native speakers of Dutch silently read Dutch sentences with and without gapping while their EEG was recorded. A left anterior negativity (LAN) was found at the first possible position at which the gapped verb could be detected, at least, for in participants who performed poorly in an end-of-sentence acceptability judgment task. This suggests that some readers do not anticipate the gapped verb, but infer the gapped verb in a bottom-up fashion, resulting in a LAN. Second, a P600 effect was observed for gapping versus no-gapping conditions, the early part of which was unaffected by plausibility. This suggests that the semantic and syntactic integration of a gapped verb is a relatively late process, and involves mechanisms similar to integrating a wh-phrase object with its verb.     

On the short-term retention of serial,tactile stimuli

In three experiments using the short-term memory distractor paradigm, Ss attempted to remember which three or four phalanges of the left hand had been stimulated and in what order. The experiments showed that forgetting increased as a function of trials, that such proactive effects could be eliminated by separating the successive trials by several minutes, that both verbal and nonverbal distractor tasks impaired retention, and that forgetting reached a maximum in approximately 6 sec. All of these results concur with those generally obtained for the short-term retention of verbal material. In addition, it was shown that the tactile recall was significantly poorer after an arithmetic distractor task presented visually than after the same task presented aurally. This result suggests an overlap between the mechanisms of tactile retention and the mechanisms of vision.