Timing of eyewitness expert testimony, jurors' need for cognition, and case strength as determinants of trial verdicts.

In 2 experiments, college students read a murder-trial transcript that included or did not include court-appointed expert testimony about eyewitness memory. The testimony either preceded or followed the evidence, and the judge's final instructions reminded or did not remind jurors about the expert's testimony. Expert testimony decreased perceptions of guilt and eyewitness believability when it followed the evidence and preceded the judge's reminder.

The psychology of telling murder stories: do we think in scripts, exemplars, or prototypes?

According to the story model of Pennington and Hastie, jurors collect information at trial and modify it with general knowledge to create case stories. Schank and Ableson argue that human memory is organized to tell and understand stories. However, Finkel and Groscup questioned the use of manipulated, experimenter-constructed narratives to demonstrate the existence of multiple prototypical crime stories.