AI Article Synopsis
- The study investigated how the presence of a weapon affects witnesses’ memory for auditory information, focusing on college students watching a video where a male character either holds a weapon or a neutral object.
- The results showed that while the weapon did not impact the accuracy of voice identification or memory for vocal traits, it did hinder memory for the meaning of words when comprehension was challenging.
- These findings align with theories suggesting that different senses have distinct pools of attention, indicating that a weapon can distract from processing complex verbal information.
Article Abstract
To examine whether a weapon's presence impairs witnesses' memory for auditory information (as it impairs memory for visual information), we conducted two experiments in which undergraduates watched one version of a videotape depicting a male target who held either a weapon or a neutral object and conversed with a female character. The semantic content of his remarks was either easy or difficult to comprehend. The weapon's presence did not affect voice identification accuracy or memory for the target's vocal characteristics (e.g., pitch, loudness, speech rate) but did worsen memory for semantic content in the Difficult Comprehension condition. Our results can be explained by multiple resource models of attention, which propose separate resource "pools" for different sensory modalities.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658210244000036 | DOI Listing |
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