Perception, Thought, and Emotion

Source: Image by Matthew Sharps / Computer Generated

In previous posts on The Forensic View, we have seen that eyewitness memories can be reconfigured in the direction of a witness's personal beliefs (Bartlett, 1932; Loftus, 1979; Sharps, 2022). This can happen not only to elements of eyewitness stories but even to entire narratives.

But how can we account for these changes? Why do they happen?

It’s important to realize that no eyewitness account is a veridical representation of our surroundings because the fact is that we don’t perceive our surroundings as such. We only perceive the part of our surroundings that our senses make possible.

We don’t perceive the ultraviolet light reflected from things we see, even though bees and some other animals do. With our 20000-Hertz capacity hearing, we hear things that frogs don’t (their capacity only reaches a few thousand Hertz; so, if you speak at a high pitch around frogs, they won’t know what you’re saying). And we’re completely deaf to sounds that our 79000-Hertz cats can hear without difficulty. Bats and dolphins are swooping around listening to well over 100000 Hertz of sound that are completely out of bounds to us. The normal human nervous system is essentially deaf and blind to much of the world around us.

Similar concepts apply to cognition, as well as to perception. You don’t need to speak at soprano pitches around frogs, assuming you’re concerned with the possibility of froggish conspiracies in the first place — their little froggy nervous systems cannot understand the complex ideas expressed in human speech. In the same way, even human nervous systems have certain limitations on thought as well as perception. No living creatures, including ourselves, perceive or think about the entire world per se — we think about analogues of that world in our minds; analogues that are limited by our perceptual and cognitive capacities.

That is why analogue theory may be very useful in helping us to understand the reconfigurative vagaries of eyewitness perception and interpretation.

The analogue theory of Power and Dalgleish (1997), designed to discuss aspects of emotion concerning cognition at multiple levels of meaning, was devised at a time when many models of cognition, situated cognition, and levels of appraisal were in development. Many of these promising models deserved far more empirical attention than they ultimately received. Yet, analogue theory may be useful in the study of eyewitness processes. We already know that arousal influences eyewitness reports; but could theoretical models of cognition and emotion apply to the realm of the eyewitness as well?

How could they not?

Human beings tend toward types as well as levels of emotional life and arousal. Some people tend to be more suspicious or even more paranoid than others; some tend to focus their coping strategies on dealing with events, while others, faced with the same events, focus on emotional responses or personal feelings about those events. And, just as honeybees see different ultraviolet aspects of flowers than do humans, differences in human emotional tendencies may contribute to different kinds of eyewitness memory reconfiguration.

Let us borrow an example directly from Power and Dalgleish, 1997. Suppose, as you walk down the street, you see someone laughing, two people whispering, and another person who crosses the street in front of you to the other side. An average person might see the first person as seeing something funny, the whisperers as having a private conversation, and the street-crosser as going into the dry cleaners across the street. Yet, if I were someone with more suspicious tendencies, deriving from whatever state-or-trait source, I might see the first person as laughing at me, the whisperers as conspiring against me, and the street crosser as deliberately avoiding me. As a result, as I became increasingly angry and aroused, the tunnel vision characteristic of that state (see Sharps, 2022) might have prevented me from even seeing the entry of the street-crosser into the dry cleaners. I may not even perceive the information which would help me to correct my analogue of the reality confronting me.

Imagine my eyewitness report of my peregrination among all these hostile people who had it in for me, when, in fact, they were laughing, whispering, and crossing the street without any actual reference to me at all.

Now, imagine an officer-involved shooting, witnessed by an event-focused person and an emotion-focused person. The event-focused person might see an officer dealing effectively with a perpetrator who poses a tactical threat. The emotion-focused person might see an officer killing a person who had loved ones and a potentially promising future, a human being whose tragic death must create terrible familial grief and hardship.

If you were the police officer in question, which person would you rather have on your jury? And if you were the spouse of the perpetrator, which one would you prefer?

Analogue theory, broadly defined, suggests that a great variety of influences may affect the ultimate representation created in the mind of any given witness. This representation may, of course, be influenced by such classically understood concepts as arousal level; but it may also include such factors as state and trait emotionality, general affective trends largely understood as elements of personality, and facets of culture and experience deriving ultimately from elements of a given individual’s development (as suggested by “situated cognition” theory — see Power and Dalgleish for review). These considerations suggest a far stronger role for social, personality, and developmental psychologists in the study of eyewitness processes than has traditionally been the case to date.

Psychological inquiry has, historically, frequently been bound more to subspecialty than to the cross-specialization demands of the given research problem. The study of eyewitness processes may serve as an example of the importance of more wholistic analyses, incorporating theory and findings from subspecialties which have not traditionally been major players in the field, but which may bring valuable new information to bear on the complex realities of these perennial questions.