"… give me a lawyer, dawg": recognizing for advice and support.

(1) Youth are particularly vulnerable to making suboptimal legal decisions due to added challenges in comprehension, as well as their ongoing neurological development. (2) This fact is especially problematic in our which frequently expects defendants to determine the outcome of their own cases (by accepting or rejecting plea offers). (3) To better ensure that guilty pleas entered by youthful defendants are indeed knowing, intelligent, and voluntary, legal counsel should be mandatory during any and all juvenile criminal proceedings.

Innocence in the shadow of COVID-19: Plea decision making during a pandemic.

Over 95% of criminal convictions in the United States are the result of guilty pleas. Consequently, it is critical that we ensure the process of pleading guilty is as free of coercion as possible. Yet, research has indicated that incarcerating defendants to await trial could have an undue influence on their decision to plead guilty.

Too much of a good thing: frequent retrieval can impair immediate new learning.

Interpolated testing can reduce mind-wandering and proactive interference, and improve note-taking. However, recent research using face-name-profession triads, has also shown that interpolated testing can impair new learning (Davis, Chan, & Wilford, 2017). In the current study, we further examined the impact of switching from testing to new learning, but with objectively-true materials.

Mistaken eyewitness identification rates increase when either witnessing or testing conditions get worse.

We examined how giving eyewitnesses a weak recognition experience impacts their identification decisions. In 2 experiments we forced a weak recognition experience for lineups by impairing either encoding or retrieval conditions. In Experiment 1 ( = 245), undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to watch either a clear or a degraded culprit video and then viewed either a culprit-present or culprit-removed lineup identification procedure.

Retrieval enhances eyewitness suggestibility to misinformation in free and cued recall.

Immediately recalling a witnessed event can increase people's susceptibility to later postevent misinformation. But this retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES) effect has been shown only when the initial recall test included specific questions that reappeared on the final test. Moreover, it is unclear whether this phenomenon is affected by the centrality of event details.

Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning.

The present study explored the effects of lecture fluency on students' metacognitive awareness and regulation. Participants watched one of two short videos of an instructor explaining a scientific concept. In the fluent video, the instructor stood upright, maintained eye contact, and spoke fluidly without notes.

Does facial processing prioritize change detection?: change blindness illustrates costs and benefits of holistic processing.

There is broad consensus among researchers both that faces are processed more holistically than other objects and that this type of processing is beneficial. We predicted that holistic processing of faces also involves a cost, namely, a diminished ability to localize change. This study (N = 150) utilized a modified change-blindness paradigm in which some trials involved a change in one feature of an image (nose, chin, mouth, hair, or eyes for faces; chimney, porch, window, roof, or door for houses), whereas other trials involved no change.