Weapon focus
[4] In one of the earliest known investigations of weapon focus, Johnson and Scott (1976) had two groups of participants come into what they thought was a laboratory study of human memory.
In actuality, they were to take part in a simulated interaction intended to determine whether the presence of a weapon would influence eyewitness memory for an event.
Participants in the control condition sat in a waiting room where they overheard a conversation between two people following which a man exited with greasy hands and a grease pen.
In the weapon condition, participants sat in the same waiting room, but instead they heard a violent argument – including furniture being thrown around – following which a man came out holding a blood-stained knife.
[5] In 1979, initially Loftus postulated that it is an expected occurrence in the event where an individual is highly aroused, such as in the case of a frightening situation.
[6] This suggestion was criticized for its lack of supporting evidence, so its author conducted several studies in 1987 and finally demonstrated the viability of weapon focus.
Specialized equipment tracked the participant's gaze as they viewed the video to determine with what frequency (and for how long) they fixated upon the item of interest (the cheque or the gun).
[7] Even so, a recent meta-analysis conducted by Fawcett et al. (2013) has demonstrated that when the data for all of the applied studies are combined, there is a small but reliable effect suggesting that weapon presence impairs actual eyewitness memory.
It found that the exposure to firearms was associated with significantly better eyewitness descriptions especially regarding basic features such as gender, height, build, age, and ethnicity.
Since the initial research conducted by Johnson and Scott (1976) and Loftus et al. (1987), others have demonstrated a similar effect using unusual objects rather than weapons.
For example, Pickel (1998) demonstrated an effect comparable to weapon focus using a video in which a man approached a cashier and presented a whole raw chicken or miniature Pillsbury Dough Boy instead of an expected item such as a wallet.
From her finding, Pickel (1998) argued that the weapon focus arose from the unusual nature of the object in the relation to the context in which it was presented.
Research by Sander and Grafman has suggested that the amygdala serves to not only process fear-inducing stimuli but also to determine which information is relevant for encoding.
[17] In situations where a weapon is present, witnesses tend to focus on the object of arousal and miss peripheral details, like the identity of the perpetrator.
This explanation relies on Easterbrook's (1959) theory that stress causes a reduction in mental resources, thus the range of cues a subject can attend to in this situation will be significantly reduced.
Studies have been performed that show that even if a subject is asked to ignore specific stimuli they are unable to, thus indicating an automatic response.
Researcher Kerri Pickel posits that if the object held by the target falls in line with the witness's schema, they will not divert as much attention to it and the characteristics of the perpetrator will be encoded normally - it is only when the combination of the perpetrator and the object is not consistent with the schema that the weapon focus effect will be significant in distorting memory.
[22] The experiments involved participants watching videos that either had a male or female perpetrator, holding either a gun or a neutral object.
The presence of the gun in the possession of the female perpetrators was more unexpected, thus participants allocated more of their attention to the weapon over their physical traits.
Pickel did, however, find that the weapon focus effect was mitigated when participants were primed and the perpetrators were categorized as dangerous and aggressive.
In some situations, like domestic violence, children can be crucial eyewitnesses, so recent research has looked at the age at which the weapon focus effect becomes influential.
One study looked at the impacts of a surprising object on the memory of children, using a syringe filled with red dye in place of a classic weapon.
[25] The presence of the syringe caused a reduction in performance on a memory task, suggesting that the children diverted a significant proportion of their attention to the weapon, so that their recall ability was negatively impacted.
At a similar time, Pickel et al. (2008) conducted comparable research, which used videos containing either a weapon or neutral object.
Adults were found to be more accurate in general with their recollection of the perpetrator than children; language abilities, appreciation for the situation and differing locations were all implicated in these asymmetries.
Pickel, Ross, and Truelove (2006) decided to take a more in depth look at these ideas and apply them specifically to reducing weapon focus.
Specific training can be developed to teach a person who may be at risk of an armed robbery, such as a bank teller or cashier, to perform an identification that is comparable to if there was no weapon present.
They show great promise that weapon focus effect and be counteracted by education on the topic, but they will remain theoretical until further research and implementation of the idea can be conducted.
