Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in the Legal Process

最近，一些研究者强调了心理过程信念对法律的过程的影响。因此，对元记忆（例如人们对记忆的理解和控制）的研究对于理解陪审员如何错误地权衡证据至关重要。特别重要的是，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，人们不知道他们不注意的视觉信息，并且他们通常在给定场景中注意到非常小比例的视觉信息。这种失败的一个特别突出的表现是当受试者难以检测到大的视图间视觉变化时。这种发现被称为“变化盲视”（CB），它发生时，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的注意力的当前焦点。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--当许多人发现被试错过了看似明显的变化时，他们会感到难以置信。在这个建议中的三组实验探索视觉元认知，记录的范围内不正确的信念视觉信息处理。第一组实验测试在何种程度上的信念，视觉组织和意图的基础上，这种元认知错误的视觉。在这些实验中，受试者将对组织良好的自然场景、混乱的场景和物体阵列的变化做出估计。第二组实验比较预测图片记忆与预测在线视觉过程，如变化检测，以确定为什么主题低估他们的表现在前一种情况下，而他们高估了他们的表现在后一种情况下。本提案中的最后实验探讨了不准确的视觉元认知可能导致陪审员错误评估刑事和民事案件中证据的可能性。正如对信心与准确性之间关系的错误信念会导致陪审员误判目击者的证据一样，对视觉的错误信念也会导致陪审员误解某人“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."