Pod Insights All In The Mind Ambiguous crimes and inattentional blindness: the science of eyewitness memory About this episode If you saw a crime, how clearly would you remember it? What about if you were questioned years… even decades later?
Eyewitness testimony is an important part of the justice system, so how much do we know about our ability to recall details?
In part three of our four-part series, Forensic, we take a deeper look at eyewitness memory. Because it's not just about what we can or can't recall, there's also the risk that we may not even recognise a crime as it's happening. It turns out we're sometimes less observant than we think, because of a phenomenon called inattentional blindness.
Don't forget to send us your questions based on the Forensic series, you can reach us at [email protected]
Guests:
Celine van GoldeAssociate Professor in Legal PsychologyUniversity of Sydney
Hayley CullenLecturerSchool of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer/reporter: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Roi HubermanYou can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
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0:08 Speaker 01 Hello, I'm Annabelle Crabb. Now, I wouldn't say I'm a hoarder exactly, but I do hang on to things. It's not just you and me. Australia's oldest library is crammed with stuff that isn't books. Terrible paintings, old menus, human hair. Is this history or hoarding? Come and have a rummage through the story of us, told by our stuff. Search for the History or Hoarding podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:40 Speaker 02 You are at a bus stop. A young girl is dropped off not long after you're there. And minutes later, an older woman comes by and gives the girl a bar of chocolate. And then they walk off holding hands. Did you just witness a crime? The unsettling answer is you might not be able to tell.
1:01 Speaker 03 With kidnapping, I think, you know, we get the audience to think about it. When they hear kidnapping, they probably think stranger comes up to child, child makes a fuss, kicks and screams, kidnapper pulls them into their van, drives off. But that mental representation we have, it might be very different to how kidnapping actually occurs.
1:24 Speaker 02 And if you didn't recognise it as anything out of the usual at the time, how much of it will you be able to remember days, months, even years later?
1:33 Speaker 04 Memory decays very rapidly. So within the first even hour that we've experienced something, we will forget about 60% of details of what we've witnessed.
1:42 Speaker 02 On All in the Mind from ABC Radio National, I'm Sana Qadar and this is part three of our special series, Forensic. It's all about the psychological tools used to crack crimes. What works, what doesn't, and the surprising ways things can go wrong. Today, eyewitness memory.
2:04 Speaker 02 All in the Mind's senior producer, James Bullen, is here. Hi, James.
2:07 Speaker 05 Hi, Sana.
2:08 Speaker 02 So how often is eyewitness memory used in cases?
2:12 Speaker 05 It's used very frequently in Australia. It's a really persuasive form of evidence for courts, juries, justice systems. So if an eyewitness testimony is available, chances are that it will be called upon in a court and it will be used. Now, I spoke to Dr. Celine Van Gold, who we also had on the last episode of the show, talking about false confessions. She's an associate professor at the University of Sydney.
2:40 Speaker 04 DNA evidence, fingerprint evidence, any other type of bodily fluids indicates that a person might have been there, but not that they committed a crime necessarily. Bullen, eyewitness does that. And there's also a lot of crimes, like domestic violence or any type of other crime, where often the only evidence that's there is somebody's memory, is the victim or the witness. So for that reason, before it even goes to court, there is a lot of value in eyewitness memory.
3:07 Speaker 02 And how much weight is put on this kind of testimony?
3:09 Speaker 05 Celine says a huge amount of weight is put on eyewitness testimony in court systems.
3:14 Speaker 04 When there is a person sitting there, tears in her eyes, saying like, I saw this with my own eyes, I'm 100% certain that's the person that murdered the other one. It has a very emotive and a strong impact on jury members and on judges. Jury research has also shown that it is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that you can provide within a jury trial.
3:37 Speaker 02 Okay, so it sounds like the stakes around eyewitness memory are really high. But Celine Van Gold also mentioned that there are shortcomings here. So what does that mean?
3:46 Speaker 05 That's where we're going to go next.
3:52 Speaker 04 We've got various factors that will influence how accurately we can recall a crime. And that's, for example, our age will have an influence. So a child will recall something that they've witnessed completely different than an adult will. But also, for example, if we are paying attention or how stressed that we are at the time that we are recalling something. And these are factors that will impact. Our memory at the time that we are encoding what is happening to us.
4:17 Speaker 05 Encoding is the first step in how we remember. The steps of memory go encoding, storage, then retrieval. But let's focus on step two, storage.
4:29 Speaker 04 So this is when we transfer what we're seeing into our memory to be stored and then recalled at a later point in time. Now, how we store our memory will also impact what and how we remember things. And this is, for example, how we tag a certain memory. So the pre-existing knowledge that we have will help us to organise all this information that is coming in and store it in a cohesive way.
4:53 Speaker 05 And just to pick up on the tagging, so what does that mean exactly?
4:57 Speaker 04 So if we look at our brain, it's technically like a big neural network where we have, we get all little pieces of information that we experience and then we try to store it in this specific like network of little nodes that are interconnected. So for example, if I witness a car crash, I've got this piece of information that there was a car involved, there might be broken glass, there might be victims there, there might be a second car that it crashed into a tree. So there's all little pieces of information that I'm trying to store in my network or in my neural network for this car crash. And then I will tag it or I will put like a little reminder like this is the car crash that I witnessed.
5:40 Speaker 04 And because I know what a car crash is, maybe I've never experienced one before, but I've known it from TV or about reading about it, I can say this is a car crash. And if I later on want to retrieve that information, I just have to think back about that tag that I gave it, like car crash, and then those details will come back.
5:57 Speaker 05 Mostly that will be the details you experienced in this particular event. Car crash that you witnessed, but tags can overlap.
6:07 Speaker 04 So what can happen as well is that there's other car crashes that I've witnessed in TV shows. And that also might like light up when I try to recall this original car crash that I've witnessed myself. And I might recall some details that I've actually not witnessed, but it's witnessed somewhere else. Um. If we think about really young kids, they might not have even have heard about a car crash. So they just see this car crashing into each other and they're like, oh, there's cars, there's. Um. There's broken glass, there's people that are injured, but even like an injured person might be the very first time that they experience it. So for them to coherently store that and then gave it, give it like one little tag becomes a lot more difficult.
6:50 Speaker 04 So they often need to be um like assisted when they're trying to recall that information later on to coherently being able to. Uh. Recall everything that they've observed.
7:01 Speaker 05 For adults, Celine says that it's actually a lot easier to organise because. Over time, we've learnt how to sort and store the information that's coming in.
7:10 Speaker 04 But we can still make mistakes because we have a lot of similar experiences. So we might, if we don't remember specific detail, we might fill that gap into our memory. With a detail from a previously experienced incident or something that we've witnessed somewhere else. And when that happens, we call that a source monitoring mistake. So we are confusing our sources between our sources where this information is coming from. I'm trying to remember the specific incident that I've witnessed, but I've got some gaps in my memory. So I'm filling it in and I'm taking it from a different source, a car crash that I saw on a TV episode.
7:48 Speaker 05 Celine says that these source monitoring mistakes, that's our brains filling gaps with information from elsewhere. Happen more often than we think.
7:57 Speaker 04 Memory decays very rapidly. So within the first even hour that we've experienced something. We will forget about sixty percent of details of what we've witnessed. It's not arbitrary what we forget, so we will keep on remembering those details that were central. To us that we paid attention to, that we focused on. And then over time, we see that about, and this is goes in two days and months that we remember about thirty percent of all the details of that specific one-off incidents that we witnessed. And it actually makes sense because when you go out in the street, you're not expecting to come across a crime or to witness a car accident. So you might not be paying attention from start to finish. It might be all of a sudden your attention gets like captured by it.
8:40 Speaker 04 You witness it and then it's different than if you study for a test where your sole focus is on just remembering what you're learning. With an incident like that, so many things are going on. So while you observe everything, you also forget a lot of those details. Now, what then happens is you remember about thirty percent, but at the same time, there's a pressure on you to remember certain things because police will come and ask you questions, friends might ask you questions, family might ask you questions. So you're eager to provide answers. Now, those natural gaps that are in our memory can actually quite easily be filled with information from different sources. And that can be a person asking a leading question. So, oh, what was the blue car
9:23 Speaker 04 doing? Like, was, were they driving erratically before they crashed? And that question already implies that a car was blue. Even though I might not have said that before or not remember it that way. And then I can take that information and slot that into my memory for the color of the car that I witnessed. It can also be that my co-witness, another person that's heard like, oh, my God, did you just see how that one person punched the other one? And while I don't remember that, well, there's another person that watched it as well. And clearly there was a punch. So now all of a sudden that becomes part of my memory as well.
9:58 Speaker 05 This is also related to what we heard about last episode of the series where in interrogations, small changes in how questions are asked can alter the way someone remembers an event. But the percentages Celine Van Gold mentioned, only remembering about thirty percent of an
10:16 Speaker 05 That was shocking to me.
10:19 Speaker 04 We do remember details that are right because otherwise we wouldn't be able to function, right? And our life would be a lie. So we're still good at remembering certain things, but it is a lot of surrounding details that might not be necessarily detrimental to anything in our daily life if we think back about our childhoods. But when it comes to crimes, then it becomes very important which ones of these details we've actually experienced and which ones we've gotten or reconstructed, so to say, because that can be the difference between a wrongful conviction or rightful conviction. It can be accusing somebody of something they didn't do, or it become a miscarriage of justice. When it
11:01 Speaker 04 comes to a legal system, how a memory works can be quite damaging for a justice system and for the integrity of a justice system.
11:14 Speaker 02 From ABC Radio National, you're listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, reporter James Bullen is asking, how reliable is eyewitness testimony?
11:29 Speaker 05 Okay, Sana, I want to show you a video now.
11:31 Speaker 02 Okay.
11:32 Speaker 05 You might have seen it before, but let's have a look. I'm going to pass you the phone.
11:37 Speaker 02 Okay.
11:38 Speaker 05 It's an awareness test.
11:39 Speaker 02 Right. I don't think I've done one before, so I don't know if I've seen this, but let's see. Okay, so I see a black page that says awareness test. Okay, now it's like a lineup of guys with basketballs. They're wearing sporty clothes. How many passes does the... Oh, I've missed the question. I was so busy explaining what I'm seeing. How many passes do they make? Okay.
12:00 Speaker 02 I don't know. This is a lot of passes.
12:04 Speaker 02 Now the number 13 has flashed up. Did you see the moonwalking bear? No, no. I was too busy panicking about how I had missed the first bit of the question. And oh my gosh, there was a moonwalking bear? Oh, okay. Right, there's the moonwalking bear. Yeah, I see him now this time around. That's so funny.
12:25 Speaker 05 It gets everyone.
12:26 Speaker 02 He's like right in the middle of the frame.
12:30 Speaker 02 It is funny because all the, they're all wearing kind of, it's quite a muted tone. So they're all wearing kind of grays and blacks and browns. And so the bear really does, unless you know he's there, he kind of blends into the background. But I feel so silly. And then the end says, look out for cyclists. So that's a very good PSA.
12:47 Speaker 05 That's a good PSA. That's a good, that's a good PSA. But I wouldn't feel silly. It gets absolutely everyone. It got me the first time I watched this video. And it's a really good example of this concept called inattentional blindness. So where we have some sort of cognitive loading, we're doing some complex task. We can miss things that are right in front of our faces. And it's a kind of bizarre phenomenon that occurs and that has some really serious implications for eyewitness testimony.
13:16 Speaker 02 And if you want to see this video, those of you listening at home, we'll link to it in our show notes as well.
13:25 Speaker 03 So inattentional blindness, it sounds like a complicated term, but it's, it's pretty simple. It's essentially looking without seeing.
13:32 Speaker 05 That's Dr. Hayley Cullen, a lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University.
13:39 Speaker 03 So it's the idea that when you're focusing your attention on something specific, you can fail to notice other very obvious and important things in your environment. So for a witness, if they're focusing their attention on driving or watching their kids at the park or something very specific, a crime might actually happen in front of them that they just don't even notice at all.
14:03 Speaker 05 This feels counterintuitive. It's hard to believe. How could someone miss something right in front of them? But Hayley says it definitely does happen.
14:13 Speaker 03 There was a case in Boston of a police officer, Kenny Conley. And he was called to the scene of a crime in a park one night. He arrives at the scene, he sees the, the suspect and he pursues them on foot.
14:28 Speaker 05 What Kenny and other police at the park don't know is that there's an undercover police officer there too. He's not in uniform. The other police mistake the undercover cop for the perpetrator of the crime. They catch him.
14:44 Speaker 03 And he was brutally assaulted. This happened just metres away from Kenny Conley as he was running past. And he claimed that he didn't notice this crime occurring because he was so focused on pursuing who he thought the suspect was, that he didn't see this happening at all.
15:02 Speaker 05 Kenny Conley completely misses what's happening metres away from him.
15:06 Speaker 03 Now, a lot of people doubted this claim that Kenny Conley gave. But researchers in the United States, led by Chris Chabri, they actually conducted a study where they tried to simulate the conditions of the Kenny Conley case. So they had participants who they took to this park. And they had them complete a counting task, like, you know, they were running along a path, counting the number of times someone in front of them touched their head. So just a basic task. And they simulated the assaults off the path, like what happened in Kenny Conley's case. And they found that around 50% of people didn't notice the crime.
15:47 Speaker 03 So when they replicated the known facts of Kenny Conley's case, it seemed like a highly plausible thing that he was claiming. There's been research since then that does show that, you know, when you're, you get your participants to complete some kind of task, like they might be counting something or watching for something specific in a scene, they might fail to notice a theft or a physical assault or something like that.
16:16 Speaker 05 What is it that makes some people notice and other people not? Is it just random chance based on how the experiment runs? Or is it something intrinsic to some people?
16:24 Speaker 03 It is very hard to find good predictors of whether someone would notice a crime or not. If anything, it seems to be more contextual things that will affect whether someone notices a crime or not. So things like how absorbed are they in the task that they're doing? How hard is the task that they're doing? Because our attention is a very finite resource. So if we're devoting a lot of attention to a task, we've got less capacity for noticing something unexpected that doesn't fit with the task that we're doing. So the harder the task, the more likely we are to fail to notice something. Things like alcohol intoxication, you know, high levels of alcohol intoxication
17:08 Speaker 03 could make someone less likely to notice something like a crime. But it seems to be more these situational factors.
17:17 Speaker 05 Recognising that this strange phenomenon exists is important, Hayley Cullen says, because it influences how eyewitnesses are seen in a courtroom. A bias towards thinking that someone would notice a crime happening right in front of them is so strong that when they don't, we don't trust that person.
17:37 Speaker 03 If they do give testimony, what our research shows in our lab, but what others are finding as well, is that they might not be believed because this intuition around we see unexpected and dangerous things is so strong that if someone claims that they didn't see it, they might not be believed. In Kenny Conley's case, what happened was that when he went to trial and made claims that he didn't notice this assault, he was actually convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, partially on the basis that people just didn't believe that his claim could be true. And he spent close to three years in prison before he was exonerated.
18:18 Speaker 03 So, yeah, it was quite serious implications for him, just based on this claim that he didn't see the crime.
18:24 Speaker 05 It does seem totally bizarre that our brains would do this, but Hayley says inattentional blindness is normal and healthy.
18:32 Speaker 03 So it's actually a very productive feature of our visual system to be able to focus on a particular task that we're doing and ignore a relevant distraction. So for the most part, when we experience this, it could be, you know, we're completing homework and we don't hear someone calling our name or, you know, waving frantically in front of us. That's actually productive to be able to stay focused in that way. It's when the thing that we fail to see is really consequential, like a crime, or when we're driving, if we don't see a particular hazard we're not expecting, that it's in those very rare circumstances where it can have really serious consequences.
19:19 Speaker 05 Along with inattentional blindness, another factor that means an eyewitness might not clock what's going on is the idea of ambiguous crime. An example of this, which Hayley has written about, is the case of Cheryl Grimmer.
19:35 Speaker 03 Cheryl Grimmer's story is a really unfortunate one. So this is going back to the 1970s. Cheryl Grimmer was a young girl who disappeared from Fairy Meadow Beach in Wollongong, just on a, you know, an ordinary summer's day. And still to this day Cheryl hasn't been found, some, you know, 50 years later. This case was, you know, a bit of a cold case for many years, but in recent years, the BBC actually put out a podcast about Cheryl's disappearance. And on the back of hearing that podcast, there are a number of people who have since come forward, who were at the beach that day or believe they have useful information
20:17 Speaker 03 that might actually contribute to reopening the case and, and legal proceedings. What the concern is here is that particularly for one of these witnesses, they said that they, they remember being at the beach that day. They saw Cheryl with a young man, but they didn't really think anything of it because she was just screaming like children do, right? You know, even with parents, they scream sometimes. And so it wasn't until hearing the BBC podcast that they really started to think that maybe they actually have really important information they need to, to provide to authorities. What this basically means though is that they didn't interpret this event as a crime initially.
21:00 Speaker 03 And 50 years later, they're starting to re-evaluate what they saw. Memory decays quite rapidly and so whether we can actually rely on the statement that someone's giving 50 years after an event, when they've reinterpreted the experience, is something that there's actually not really a lot of research about how that might impact the quality of the evidence that they give.
21:25 Speaker 05 And you've kind of alluded to it there and mentioned it, but kidnapping as an ambiguous crime, what does that mean?
21:31 Speaker 03 Ambiguous crime is a term that, when I was first starting out as a researcher in Eyewitness Memory, I was looking into this, I kind of had to create it as a term. But what I meant in saying it's ambiguous is that some kidnappings, you know, we have what we call schemas, which are event representations, like how we typically expect an event is going to unfold. You know, when you go to the movies, you kind of know you're gonna go get your popcorn, you sit down, there are previews, the movie starts, there's credits, it goes dark. You've got this very clear mental representation of how that event will unfold. We have those with crimes as well. And with kidnapping, I think, you know, if we get the audience to think about it, when
22:15 Speaker 03 they hear kidnapping, they probably think stranger comes up to child, child makes a fuss, kicks and screams, kidnapper pulls them into their van, drives off. But that mental representation we have, it might be very different to how kidnapping actually occurs. So kidnappings sometimes happen where a child willingly goes with a stranger without obvious fuss, and that means that it could be the type of event that when it's happening, we don't realise that it's actually a crime in that instance. That could impact the way that we remember it because of that initial perception is not that it's a crime, but it could just be an ordinary day-to-day event.
23:01 Speaker 05 And you've done some experiments that test kind of eyewitness reactions to kidnappings. What did you do and what did you find?
23:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, so this was way back when I was an honours student, so when I was doing my research, my first research project as a psychology student. And it was driven by, it was actually inspired by the William Tyrrell case, where, you know, from the reports, we know that William Tyrrell was in Spider-Man costume, and so he should have been someone who really stood out on the day he went missing. But nobody has been able to give information about his whereabouts on that day. Maybe it's because if William was abducted or kidnapped, maybe it just came across like an ordinary event. So we ran this study where we had, again, participants, they didn't know what the
23:52 Speaker 03 study was about. They saw a video of a bus stop where a little girl arrives by car at the bus stop. She goes and sits down and eventually an older woman comes up to her, has a conversation with her. And in some of the video versions, we changed the ending.
24:13 Speaker 05 So in one version, the scene just ends while the girl and the older woman are talking to one another. There's no crime that happens.
24:21 Speaker 03 In another version, the lady offers the little girl a chocolate bar and they leave holding hands. And it's what we would consider an ambiguous kidnapping. It doesn't show the typical signs of struggle. And if you see it, you might not interpret it as a crime.
24:37 Speaker 05 Then in the third version, the video ends with what they call the unambiguous crime.
24:43 Speaker 03 Where the lady gets up, she pulls the girl's arm and drags her, and the little girl calls out for help. And I should say, our participants have headphones on, so they think they're listening to their music, they're waiting for their bus to arrive. So in that unambiguous kidnapping version, they can actually hear the girl screaming over the audio. And what we did was we asked our participants whether they noticed anything strange about the video that they saw, so that we could get a sense of what their interpretation of the event was. Interestingly, what we found when we first ran this study was that about half of the
25:27 Speaker 03 participants who were shown the video with the unambiguous crime, you know, the screaming and dragging, did not interpret it as a crime. They said, you know, didn't think I saw anything like a crime. The reason for that, though, was while participants were watching this video, we told them that they needed to be, you know, counting the number of buses that passed the bus stop. So, like I said before, their, their attention was kind of being taken away from what was actually happening in the video, in the, with the, the lady and the girl. So what it suggested to us is that when people are distracted or focusing
26:08 Speaker 03 on their day-to-day tasks, even things that are seemingly obvious might not be interpreted as, as crimes, like abduction or kidnapping.
26:18 Speaker 05 Hayley says that could change the way these kinds of experiments are done in the future and what we understand about how eyewitnesses make sense of what they see.
26:27 Speaker 03 A lot of researchers, even eyewitness researchers, I think, just made the assumption that we notice crimes and so out in our experiments, we don't have to worry about disguising what we're researching. We can just ask people to watch our crime video and tell us what they remember. But I think it just goes to show that at least, you know, some of the research, we might actually be overestimating what people remember because we're making assumptions about what they saw. When my research is showing that we might miss things about a crime and we might not interpret things to be crimes in the first place.
27:03 Speaker 05 As we talked about right at the top of the episode, the stakes are high here. Eyewitness testimony is a powerful piece of evidence in the justice system and it can make or break convictions.
27:13 Speaker 03 If we can better understand eyewitness memory, we can reduce instances of wrongful convictions, which I think benefits society at large. You know, it benefits witnesses who are, you know, might feel guilty about making a mistake in identification. It benefits, you know, innocent people who are saved from a wrongful conviction. It benefits society because when a person's wrongfully convicted, often that means that the guilty person continues to commit crimes and that puts society at large in danger. At the other end, I think, you know, for certain types of crimes, memory evidence is so So crucial, it might be the only thing. And it means it's very hard to secure genuine convictions.
27:57 Speaker 03 So in cases of domestic and family violence, for example, we're often relying on testimonial evidence. And I also think it's important to make sure that we understand eyewitness memory or how memory works in these contexts, so we can make sure that there is justice for those who need it most. So it's, you know, both ends I'm really focused on. If we can prevent wrongful convictions and we can make sure we're securing genuine convictions, then ultimately I think we've got, you know, an even better legal system.
28:33 Speaker 02 That is Dr Hayley Cullen, who is a lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University. And you also heard from Dr Celine Van Gold, who's an associate professor in legal psychology at the University of Sydney. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr and senior producer and reporter this week, James Bullen. If you have any questions about forensic psychology you want answered, about memory, criminal profiling, lie detection, maybe it's something you've seen on TV and you're wondering if it's true, send us an email. I'd love to know what you think of the series. You can reach me on [email protected] . I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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