Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in the Legal Process

最近，一些研究人员强调了关于心理过程的信念对法律程序的影响。因此，研究元记忆（例如人们对记忆的理解和控制）对于理解陪审员如何错误地权衡证据至关重要。尤其重要的是，人们对心理功能的看法与人们的实际能力存在分歧。最近的研究表明，人们没有意识到他们没有注意到的视觉信息，而且在给定的场景中，他们通常只注意到很小一部分视觉信息。这种失败的一种特别显著的表现是，受试者难以察觉大的视界变化。这一发现被称为“变化盲视”（CB），无论受试者是否在积极寻找变化，甚至当变化的对象是受试者当前关注的焦点时，它都会发生。在某种程度上，人们对这些发现的兴趣是基于它们与直觉的冲突程度——当许多人发现看似明显的变化被实验对象忽略时，他们都不相信。本研究通过三组实验探讨视觉元认知，记录了视觉信息处理错误信念的范围。第一组实验测试了关于视觉组织和意图的信念在多大程度上构成了视觉中的元认知错误。在这些实验中，受试者将对组织良好的自然场景、混乱的场景和对象数组的变化做出估计。第二组实验将对图片记忆的预测与对在线视觉过程（如变化检测）的预测进行比较，以确定为什么受试者在前一种情况下低估了自己的表现，而在后一种情况下却高估了自己的表现。本文最后的实验探讨了在刑事和民事案件中，不准确的视觉元认知可能导致陪审员错误评估证据的可能性。正如对信心-准确性相关性的错误信念会导致陪审员误判目击者的证据一样，对视觉的错误信念可能会导致他们误解某人“应该看到”的东西。

Recently, a number of researchers have emphasized the impact that beliefs about mental processes can have on the legal process. Research on metamemory (e.g. people's understanding of and control over memory) is therefore critical for understanding how jurors might incorrectly weigh evidence. Particularly important are situations where beliefs about mental functioning diverge from people's actual capabilities. Recent research has demonstrated that people are unaware of visual information that they do not attend to, and that they typically attend to a very small proportion of visual information in a given scene. One particularly striking manifestation of this failure occurs when subjects have difficulty detecting large between-view visual changes. This finding is referred to as "change blindness" (CB), and it occurs regardless of whether the subject is actively searching for changes, and even when the changing object is the current focus of the subject's attention. In part, interest in these findings is based on the degree to which they conflict with intuition - many people are incredulous when they discover that seemingly obvious changes are missed by subjects. Three sets of experiments in this proposal explore visual metacognition, documenting the scope of incorrect beliefs about visual information processing. A first set of experiments tests the degree to which beliefs about visual organization and intention underlie this metacognitive errors in vision. In these experiments, subjects will make estimates about changes to well organized natural scenes, jumbled scenes, and object arrays. A second set of experiments compares predictions about picture memory with predictions about on-line visual processes such as change detection to determine why subjects underestimate their performance in the former case, while they overestimate their performance in the latter case. The final experiments in this proposal explore the possibility that inaccurate visual metacognition can lead jurors to misevaluate evidence in criminal and civil cases. Just as incorrect beliefs about the confidence-accuracy correlation can lead jurors to misjudge eyewitness evidence, inaccurate beliefs about vision may lead them to misunderstand what someone "should have seen."