The unconscious transference effect: Are innocent bystanders ever misidentified?

Unconscious transference refers to an eyewitness's misidentification of an innocent bystander for a criminal perpetrator because of the witness's exposure to the bystander in another context. In a series of five field studies involving 330 retail store clerks and 340 students, five retention intervals from 2 hours to 2 weeks, seven bystander-perpetrator intervals from 2 minutes to 2 weeks, three line-up types, two levels of line-up similarity, four different bystanders and four different targets, with one exception no evidence was obtained that could be interpreted to demonstrate the phenomenon of unconscious transference. That is, the resultsr repeatedly failed to reveal more misidentifications of an innocent bystander by witnesses who had been previously exposed to the bystander than by control evewitnesses who had not. To the contrary, the prior observation of the bystander often served to reduce the frequency of misidentification. In the final experiment the kind of misidentification error referred to as unconscious transference did occur, but only within a particular combination of bystander-perpetrator similarity and line-up construction: a combination that, in conjunction with the kind of event used, seems unlikely in real-world settings. Nevertheless, the inclusion of a familiar face in the line-ups often altered witnesses' choices in such a way that choosing someone was more likely when the lineup included a familiar face than when it did not. Finally, in contrast to the current explanations of unconscious transference, it is argued that it may not be a sense of familiarity with the bystander that is the basis of misidentifications; rather, it may also include incorrect inferences about the likelihood that the bystander might be the perpetrator.     

Blindness to background: an inbuilt bias for visual objects

Sixty‐eight 2‐ to 12‐year‐olds and 30 adults were shown colorful displays on a touchscreen monitor and trained to point to the location of a named color. Participants located targets near‐perfectly when presented with four abutting colored patches. When presented with three colored patches on a colored background, toddlers failed to locate targets in the background. Eye tracking demonstrated that the effect was partially mediated by a tendency not to fixate the background. However, the effect was abolished when the targets were named as nouns, whilst the change to nouns had little impact on eye movement patterns. Our results imply a powerful, inbuilt tendency to attend to objects, which may slow the development of color concepts and acquisition of color words. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/TKO1BPeAiOI . [Correction added on 27 January 2017, after first online publication: The video abstract link was added.]     

Lay knowledge of eyewitness issues: A Canadian evaluation

Lay opinions concerning eyewitness topics were surveyed in three community samples of juror‐eligible participants in Canada. The scientific reliability of these topics had been previously evaluated by eyewitness experts. The first survey assessed participant responses to the identically worded expert items. Participants responded to many statements with greater accuracy than anticipated. Two subsequent surveys assessed the consistency of lay knowledge across variations in the directionality and wording of items and the provision of additional contextual information. Taken together, jury‐eligible participants frequently responded to survey items in ways that closely resembled the responses of experts and suggested awareness and understanding of these topics at levels beyond those previously obtained. Further, the provision of contextual information increased response accuracy and reduced the frequencies of ‘Don't Know’ responses. Deficiencies in knowledge for 50% of the topics were also apparent; however, these topics were frequently those for which the experts themselves had not reached consensus. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Subadditive versus hyperbolic discounting: A comparison of choice and matching

Impulsive and myopic choices are often explained as due to hyperbolic discounting, meaning that people are impatient for outcomes available immediately, and become increasingly more patient the more the outcome is delayed. Recent research, however, has suggested that much experimental evidence for increasing patience is actually due to subadditive discounting: people are less patient (per-time-unit) over shorter intervals regardless of when they occur. Because previous research into subadditive discounting has used a choice elicitation procedure, the present paper tests whether it generalises to matching. We find strong evidence that it does, but also find weak evidence of increasing patience for matching. We suggest, however, that subadditive discounting alone may be sufficient to account for all of our results. We conclude by questioning the contribution that hyperbolic discounting makes to our understanding of time preference.     

Efficient statistics, common currencies and the problem of reward-harvesting

The mammalian brain is equipped with reward-harvesting mechanisms that efficiently categorize and value the behavioral choices that lead to rewards necessary for survival. In this context, 'efficiency' embodies the idea of achieving maximum returns for minimal energetic investments and places a premium on how an animal represents its available options. But the capacity to efficiently represent choices is a profoundly difficult problem because representations for behavioral choice depend intimately on the statistics of information arriving not just from the sensory world and but also from within the creature itself. Any complete account of decision-making in mammals must efficiently connect the internal needs to the perceptual apparatus available to a creature moment-to-moment.