Weapon focus

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Cards (5)

  • weapon focus- Paying more attention to a threatening object used during a crime which limits the ability to remember other features
  •  Weapon focus suggests that eyewitnesses concentrate their attention on the weapon rather than other details of the crime making it unreliable because weapons create a life-threatening situation so we focus on the item that we see as a danger rather than the face of the perpetrator to aid our survival
    • When a weapon is present at an incident we tend to pay attention to the weapon, and so do not have enough attention to pay to other details about the incident. 
    • As we are paying less attention to other details we are less likely to encode that information in our memory, so are more likely to forget the other details of the incident. 
    • The presence of a weapon may also increase our stress above the optimal level of arousal. 
    • Due to the level of stress being too high because of focusing on the weapon, our memory will decline so we are less able to remember details about the incident. 
    • Steblay (1992) looked at the results of 19 studies about weapon focus and found that when there was a weapon there was lower accuracy in the identification from a line up, suggesting it does affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. 
    • Erickson et al. (2014) found that when participants saw photographs those who saw a photograph of someone holding a gun out could identify the person fewer times than the photo of someone holding out a glass, showing that a weapon may negatively affect the testimony of witnesses
    • strength
    • The use of cognitive interviews may reduce the effect of a weapon on the testimony of witnesses, as strategies such as asking the witness to remember the context may produce memories of other aspects of the incident, showing the information has been encoded.
    • A lot of research has been done using videos or photographs, so may not be reflective of real life incidents, so the use of a weapon may not have such an effect on the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
    • weakness