🧠 Psychologypublished 2w ago
The weapon focus effect causes witnesses to forget a criminal's face
When a crime involves a weapon, eyewitness memory of the perpetrator's facial features drops drastically. Eye-tracking experiments show that witnesses fixate disproportionately on the gun or knife itself. This attentional tunneling, driven by high arousal and threat evaluation, starves peripheral details of cognitive resources. In lineups, witnesses are significantly less likely to correctly identify a suspect if a weapon was visible during the incident.
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