The effect of confession evidence on jurors' verdict decisions: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Objective: Over the past 4 decades, discrepant research findings have emerged in the juror-confession literature, prompting the need for a systematic review and meta-analysis that assesses the effect of confession evidence (coerced or noncoerced) on conviction rates and the efficacy of trial safeguards.

Hypotheses: We did not predict any directional hypotheses. Some studies show increased convictions when a confession is present (vs.

Efficacy of memory protocols in 9- to 89-year-olds' memory for prior contacts.

Memory for prior contacts has several important applied implications, including contact tracing (for communicable diseases). Incomplete episodic memory reports, which occur across the developmental lifespan but are particularly relevant for children and older adults, may hamper such efforts. Prior research has shown that cognitively informed memory techniques may bolster recall of contacts in adults, but that work has not addressed the developmental efficacy of these techniques.

The effect of credibility assessment techniques on consistency and subsequent memory for the truth.

Repeated interviews are common during an investigation, and perceived consistency between multiple statements is associated with an interviewee's credibility. Furthermore, research has shown that the act of lying can affect a person's memory for what truthfully occurred. The current study assessed the influence of lying on memory during initial and repeated interviews, as well as how an interviewer's approach might affect between-statement consistency for true and false statements.

The impact of alertness vs. fatigue on interrogators in an actigraphic study of field investigations.

Investigative interviews (e.g., interrogations) are a critical component of criminal, military, and civil investigations.

PROTOCOL: Interview and interrogation methods and their effects on true and false confessions: An update and extension.

This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objective is to assess the effects of interrogation approach on confession outcomes for criminal (mock) suspects.

Enhancing the effectiveness of contact tracing interviews: A randomized controlled experiment of an enhanced cognitive interview protocol.

Objectives: To compare the efficacy of a psychologically-based contact tracing interview protocol to a control protocol that emulated current practices under both interviewer-led and self-led modalities.

Methods: This randomized controlled experiment utilized a 2 × 2 factorial design (Enhanced Cognitive protocol vs Control protocol; Interviewer-led call vs Self-led online survey). Data were collected online (n = 200; M = 44; 56.

Active exploration of faces in police lineups increases discrimination accuracy.

Eyewitness identifications play a key role in the justice system, but eyewitnesses can make errors, often with profound consequences. We used findings from basic science and innovative technologies to develop and test whether a novel interactive lineup procedure, wherein witnesses can rotate and dynamically view the lineup faces from different angles, improves witness discrimination accuracy compared with a widely used procedure in laboratories and police forces around the world-the static frontal-pose photo lineup. No novel procedure has previously been shown to improve witness discrimination accuracy.

Matthew or compensatory effects? Factors that influence the math literacy of primary-school children in Germany.

Background And Aims: This study focuses on individual differences in the math competencies of primary-school children in Germany. It considers whether or not there are Matthew or compensatory effects in math literacy and which factors and background characteristics of primary-school children can affect competence development. Despite the abundant research on this topic, the findings are often ambiguous, and studies in the German context are sparse.

Improvement of the coherent model function for S-branch Raman linewidth determination in oxygen.

Determination of S-branch Raman linewidths of oxygen from picosecond time-domain pure rotational coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (RCARS) measurements requires consideration of coherence beating. We present an optimization of the established model for fitting the coherence decay in oxygen, which leads to an improvement in Raman linewidth data quality, especially for the challenging small signal intensity and decay constant regime, enabling the application for low oxygen concentrations. Two modifications to the fitting procedure are discussed, which aim at reliably fitting the second coherence beat properly.

Evaluating the benefits of a rapport-based approach to investigative interviews: A training study with law enforcement investigators.

The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a rapport-based approach to interviewing that includes productive questioning skills, conversational rapport, and relational rapport-building tactics. We predicted that training police investigators in a rapport-based approach would significantly increase the use of rapport-based tactics and that such tactics would directly influence the interviewee's perceptions of rapport and indirectly lead to increased cooperation and disclosure of information. We trained federal, state, and local law enforcement investigators ( = 67) in the use of evidence-based interviewing techniques.

Policy and procedure recommendations for the collection and preservation of eyewitness identification evidence.

Objective: The Executive Committee of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the American Psychological Association) appointed a subcommittee to update the influential 1998 scientific review paper on guidelines for eyewitness identification procedures.

Method: This was a collaborative effort by six senior eyewitness researchers, who all participated in the writing process. Feedback from members of AP-LS and the legal communities was solicited over an 18-month period.

Determination of N-N and N-O S-branch Raman linewidths using time-resolved picosecond pure rotational coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering.

- and - S-branch Raman linewidths have been determined using picosecond dual-broadband pure rotational coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS). Time-resolved rotational CARS measurements were performed in gas-phase and air for temperatures up to 1900 K in order to determine the time constants of the coherence decay to subsequently calculate the S-branch Raman linewidths. Coherence decay time traces and the resulting S-branch Raman linewidths are presented for - and - collisions.

Conceptual priming and context reinstatement: A test of direct and indirect interview techniques.

Recent findings suggest that priming may be useful for facilitating disclosure in investigative interviews; however, the effects of priming on behavioral outcomes have been mixed. The current studies attempted to replicate the increase in information disclosure when the concept of "openness" is primed. We assessed the separate and combined influence of context reinstatement instructions and activation of the concept of openness (via lexical primes in Experiment 1, via contextual and embodiment primes in Experiment 2) on information disclosure.

Retrieval potentiates new learning: A theoretical and meta-analytic review.

A growing body of research has shown that retrieval can enhance future learning of new materials. In the present report, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature on this finding, which we term test-potentiated new learning. Our primary objectives were to (a) produce an integrative review of the existing theoretical explanations, (b) summarize the extant empirical data with a meta-analysis, (c) evaluate the existing accounts with the meta-analytic results, and (d) highlight areas that deserve further investigations.

Psychological Perspectives on Interrogation.

Proponents of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the United States have claimed that such methods are necessary for obtaining information from uncooperative terrorism subjects. In the present article, we offer an informed, academic perspective on such claims. Psychological theory and research shows that harsh interrogation methods are ineffective.

Assessing law enforcement performance in behavior-based threat detection tasks involving a concealed weapon or device.

Across 3 experiments, we assessed the ability of law enforcement officers and naïve controls to detect the concealment of a weapon or device. Study 1 used a classic signal detection paradigm in which participants were asked to assess whether a target was concealing a neutered 9-mm handgun. Study 2 involved a compound signal detection paradigm in which participants assessed whether or not 1 of several individuals was concealing an unstable device in their backpack.

Three-color vibrational CARS thermometry of fuel-rich ethylene/air flames using a potassium gadolinium tungstate Raman-active crystal as a source of narrowband probe radiation.

Three-color broadband vibrational coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) temperature measurements were carried out in laminar fuel-rich sooting ethylene/air flames. Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) of a picosecond pump laser pulse in a Raman-active potassium gadolinium tungstate [KGd(WO)] crystal was employed as a source of narrowband probe radiation. In the three-color CARS experiment, this wavelength-shifted radiation enables N-based vibrational CARS temperature measurements in sooting flames free of the signal interference with the absorption/emission bands of the flame intermediate radicals C.

Juror sensitivity to false confession risk factors: Dispositional vs. situational attributions for a confession.

Research on jurors' perceptions of confession evidence suggests that jurors may not be sensitive to factors that can influence the reliability of a confession. Jurors' decisions tend not to be influenced by situational pressures to confess, which suggests that jurors commit the correspondence bias when evaluating a confession. One method to potentially increase sensitivity and counteract the correspondence bias is by highlighting a motivation other than guilt for the defendant's confession.

Sensor-based surgical activity recognition in unconstrained environments.

Introduction: Automatic surgical activity recognition in the operating room (OR) is mandatory to enable assistive surgical systems to manage the information presented to the surgical team. Therefore the purpose of our study was to develop and evaluate an activity recognition model.

Material And Methods: The system was conceived as a hierarchical recognition model which separated the recognition task into activity aspects.

Online recognition of surgical instruments by information fusion.

Purpose: Automatic online recognition of surgical instruments is required to monitor instrument use for surgical process modeling. A system was developed and tested using available technologies.

Methods: A recognition system was developed using RFID technology to identify surgical activities.

Modeling the influence of investigator bias on the elicitation of true and false confessions.

The aim of this study was to model various social and cognitive processes believed to be associated with true and false confessions by exploring the link between investigative biases and what occurs in the interrogation room. Using the Russano et al. (Psychol Sci 16:481-486, 2005) paradigm, this study explored how perceptions of guilt influenced the frequency and type of interrogation tactics used, suspect's perceptions of the interrogation process, the likelihood of confession, and investigator's resulting perceptions of culpability.

English speakers attend more strongly than Spanish speakers to manner of motion when classifying novel objects and events.

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in a Spanish-speaking context at sorting novel, animated objects and events into categories on the basis of manner of motion, an attribute that is prominently marked in English but not in Spanish. In contrast, English and Spanish speakers performed similarly at classifying on the basis of path, an attribute that is prominently marked in both languages.