Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in the Legal Process

思考和观察：法律程序中的视觉元认知

• 批准号: 0411944
• 负责人: Daniel Levin
• 金额: $ 15.3万
• 依托单位: Vanderbilt University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-11-01 至 2005-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0411944&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Thinking; Seeing; Visual; Metacognition; Legal

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."

最近，许多研究人员强调了关于心理过程的信念对法律过程的影响。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。尤其重要的是关于心理功能的信念与人们的实际能力存在偏差的情况。最近的研究表明，人们不会意识到他们没有关注的视觉信息，并且他们通常会关注给定场景中的一小部分视觉信息。当受试者难以检测到视图间较大的视觉变化时，就会出现这种失败的一个特别显着的表现。这一发现被称为“变化盲视”（CB），无论受试者是否主动寻找变化，甚至当变化的对象是受试者当前注意力的焦点时，它都会发生。在某种程度上，对这些发现的兴趣是基于它们与直觉相冲突的程度——当许多人发现受试者错过了看似明显的变化时，他们感到难以置信。该提案中的三组实验探索了视觉元认知，记录了有关视觉信息处理的错误信念的范围。第一组实验测试了视觉组织和意图的信念在多大程度上构成了视觉元认知错误。在这些实验中，受试者将对组织良好的自然场景、混乱的场景和物体阵列的变化进行估计。第二组实验将有关图片记忆的预测与有关在线视觉过程（例如变化检测）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，而在后一种情况下高估了自己的表现。该提案的最终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的证据的可能性。正如对置信度与准确性相关性的错误信念可能会导致陪审员误判目击者证据一样，对视力的不准确信念可能会导致他们误解某人“应该看到”的内容。