Cognitive Foundations is an open-source, collaborative textbook edited by Dr. Celeste Pilegard. Last fall, she brought me onto her team as a subject matter expert in order to revamp “Chapter 6: Memory in Context” in preparation for the release of the second edition of the textbook. I did a lot of revising of the current material (nearly all of it overlapped with the material I taught in my PSYC 144 Memory & Amnesia course) and did a good amount of original writing as well.
We released a preprint of our paper, “The Scientific Principles of Memory versus the Federal Rules of Evidence,” on Open Science Framework. The manuscript was submitted for publication about a week ago.
Preprints, although citable, have neither been accepted/denied for publication nor have they undergone the peer-review process. It is expected that published manuscripts will differ from the original preprint—sometimes even in major ways (although that is never the hope). We decided to make our submitted manuscript available in this modality due to the expressed interest from those outside of our field.
This paper explains how memory contaminates, when memory is reliable, and how the current interpretation of the Federal Rules of Evidence (as it relates to eyewitness identification) may actually exacerbate the problem of irreparably contaminated evidence being used in the courtroom.
The UC San Diego Graduate & Professional Student Association granted me a $300 award for travel to the annual conference for the Association of Psychological Science in May. At this conference, I’ll be presenting on how response bias — not to be confused with suggestibility — is likely responsible for the flat confidence-accuracy relationship that is typically exhibited for lineup rejections. More information on this presentation can be found on this previous post.
The Vision Sciences Society (VSS) and National Eye Institute (NEI) awarded me their $1,000 NEI Early Career Scientist Travel Grant for the upcoming VSS conference in May in St. Pete Beach, FL.
Undergraduate, doctoral, and post-doctoral researchers who are first-author presenters on a conference abstract were eligible for the award. A subcommittee of the VSS Board of Directors determined winners based on the scientific quality of the submitted presentation and by other criteria set by the National Institutes of Health.
I will be presenting a modeling paper that addresses the underlying decision variable that the brain uses when rejecting a set of familiar objects (e.g., in this case, faces). My latest post on the VSS conference talks about my poster session more in depth.
My department nomination for the Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars (SGTS) Program was accepted, which means that I’m going to be taking on another Associate-In position this summer! The course I’ll be teaching during UCSD’s summer session II is PSYC 162 Psychology & Law. PSYC 162 is an upper-division undergraduate course that closely aligns with my research interests, and I’m choosing to teach it over Zoom in order to gain further experience teaching in different environments.
Today I received word from both the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) that my abstracts were accepted at their annual conventions. Both of these presentations are part of my dissertation work that addresses the often-flat confidence-accuracy relationship found in police lineup rejections. Below is a description of each poster and information on the talks themselves.
Thank you to the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps of the United States Navy for having me talk to their defense counsel teams in San Diego, CA and Bremerton, WA today for one of their weekly training days! In my talk, I discussed recall and recognition memory processes, why that distinction matters in the eyewitness domain, and then we talked about how eyewitness IDs are handled (and mishandled) by the criminal justice system. I conceptualize this (mis)handling as being due to the legal system’s lack of understanding on how memory contamination occurs in recognition memory. In my talk, I mentioned the latest consensus paper published in 2021, and introduced some topics that I’ll be discussing in my upcoming paper entitled “The Principles of Memory versus the Federal Rules of Evidence.” (It’s a working title.)
As always, speaking to attorneys about the latest research is always fun for me. I am thankful for this opportunity!
With my name officially on the registrar, I’m happy to announce that I’m teaching a 300-person, upper-division undergraduate course during the Winter 2023 quarter! I’ve accepted an “associate-in-lieu” position in the Department of Psychology at UCSD.
The course is PSYC 144 Memory & Amnesia. The course will review basic research into the nature of memory. It will survey current research and theory concerning human memory and amnesia from both cognitive and neuropsychological perspectives. Topics covered will include short-term memory, encoding and retrieval processes, forgetting, memory distortion, implicit memory, drug effects on memory, amnesic syndromes, and the effects of aging on memory processes.
I’m incredibly proud to report that I recently advanced to candidacy! In our department, that means passing a qualifying paper defense (which I did in July 2020) as well as successfully “defending” a dissertation proposal paper and presentation.
My dissertation, “Evidence of Innocence: The Psychology of Lineup Rejections,” will comprise of three published or to-be-published studies. The first study was published in Law and Human Behavior earlier this year. The second and third studies will be basic-science studies investigating 1) why the confidence-accuracy relationship for lineup rejections ranges from negligible to slightly-positive and 2) the specific decision variable that is used for confidence during a lineup rejection.
Thank you to my committee: Drs. John Wixted (Chair), Tim Brady, Uma Karmarkar, John Serences, and Angela Yu.
Law and Human Behavior chose to highlight a recent paper of mine in their “Research Highlight” series. The paper explores the viability of new police lineup procedure — a “Reveal” procedure — that enhances evidence of suspect innocence in a police lineup. (Lineups are typically designed to gather information about a suspect’s guilt.) This exploration was done using signal-detection-based model of eyewitness memory. LHB created a nifty graphic in their tweet below that explains what the paper is about, whom the paper is for, and why the paper is important. (Links to the original tweet and paper are below if the embed ever fails.)