The consolidation of plaintiffs: the effects of number of plaintiffs on jurors' liability decisions, damage awards, and cognitive processing of evidence

In this study, 135 jury-eligible adults were randomly assigned to 1 of 5 aggregations of plaintiffs involving 1, 2, 4, 6, and 10 claimants. Jurors were shown a 5- to 6-hr trial involving claims of differential repetitive stress injuries by each plaintiff. Measures concerning liability, damages, and various cognitive and attributional factors were collected. The defendant was more likely to be judged as liable as the number of plaintiffs increased. Awards reached a zenith at 4 plaintiffs and then began to decrease. Increases in the number of plaintiffs who were aggregated degraded information processing. Limits of juror competence in complex trials and juror aids were discussed.     

Searching night and day: a dissociation of effects of circadian phase and time awake on visual selective attention and vigilance

How does sleepiness affect selective attention? We studied the effect of circadian phase and time awake on visual search. The generalized-cognitive-slowing hypothesis predicts that search rate will be slower, feature guidance less effective, and response time (RT) lengthened when observers are sleepy. Observers performed spatial-configuration (finding a 5 among 2s) and conjunction (finding red vertical among red horizontal and green vertical) search tasks during 38 hr of wakefulness under constant conditions. Adverse circadian phases and elapsed time awake did lead to increased RT (corrected for errors). However, contrary to the hypothesis, search rates (indexed by RT x Set Size slopes) were constant across the protocol. This was true for conjunction as well as for spatial-configuration search, indicating that feature guidance was also insensitive to sleepiness. The locus of sleepiness effects on search is probably downstream from the bottleneck of attentional selection. Observers did trade accuracy for speed when sleepy. This implicates decision-stage impairments.