The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote a feature on Richard Atkinson, one of the most distinguished and influential memory researchers of all time. The feature highlights a few of his major accomplishments and positions in academia as well as his focus in present day. The article opens with a mention of a project that I’m working on. To quote the lede (with a link to the full-text existing below), “At 96, Richard C. Atkinson talks with interest and enthusiasm about a young professor’s research on reading skills, the same enthusiasm that he has embraced his entire life.”

We published a new paper of mine in JEP: Applied on the effect of a simultaneous rate-them-all lineup procedure on discriminability.

A paper of mine was just published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. This paper investigates why the confidence-accuracy relationship (CAC) for lineup rejections is often flat (while the relationship between confidence and accuracy for postiveIDs is much stronger). Specifically, this paper looks at the role of response bias in terms of restricting the range of memory signal strengths associated with a particular decision. Range restriction for particular decision may lower the ability to detect a possible relationship given a particular level of confidence due to a reduction in sensitivity.

 A new paper of mine came out in Journal of Memory and Language this past February. This is a math modeling paper looking at whether a MAX or AVG decision rule is being used as the basis for confidence when rejecting a lineup. The decision rule for posIDs, by comparison, is a MAX rule.

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.

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!