Miko M. Wilford

Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning.

The present study explored the effects of lecture fluency on students’ metacognitive awareness and regulation. Participants watched one of two short videos of an instructor explaining a scientific concept. In the fluent video, the instructor stood upright, maintained eye contact, and spoke fluidly without notes. In the disfluent video, the instructor slumped, looked away, and spoke haltingly with notes. After watching the video, participants in Experiment 1 were asked to predict how much of the content they would later be able to recall, and participants in Experiment 2 were given a text-based script of the video to study. Perceived learning was significantly higher for the fluent instructor than for the disfluent instructor (Experiment 1), although study time was not significantly affected by lecture fluency (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the fluent instructor was rated significantly higher than the disfluent instructor on traditional instructor evaluation questions, such as preparedness and effectiveness. However, in both experiments, lecture fluency did not significantly affect the amount of information learned. Thus, students’ perceptions of their own learning and an instructor’s effectiveness appear to be based on lecture fluency and not on actual learning.

Retrieval Enhances Eyewitness Suggestibility to Misinformation in Free and Cued Recall

Immediately recalling a witnessed event can increase peoples susceptibility to later postevent misinformation. But this retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES) effect has been shown only when the initial recall test included specific questions that reappeared on the final test. Moreover, it is unclear whether this phenomenon is affected by the centrality of event details. These limitations make it difficult to generalize RES to criminal investigations, which often begin with free recall prior to more specific queries from legal officials and attorneys. In 3 experiments, we examined the influence of test formats (free recall vs. cued recall) and centrality of event details (central vs. peripheral) on RES. In Experiment 1, both the initial and final tests were cued recall. In Experiment 2, the initial test was free recall and the final test was cued recall. In Experiment 3, both the initial and final tests were free recall. Initial testing increased misinformation reporting on the final test for peripheral details in all experiments, but the effect was significant for central details only after aggregating the data from all 3 experiments. These results show that initial free recall can produce RES, and more broadly, that free recall can potentiate subsequent learning of complex prose materials.

Does Facial Processing Prioritize Change Detection? Change Blindness Illustrates Costs and Benefits of Holistic Processing

There is broad consensus among researchers both that faces are processed more holistically than other objects and that this type of processing is beneficial. We predicted that holistic processing of faces also involves a cost, namely, a diminished ability to localize change. This study (N = 150) utilized a modified change-blindness paradigm in which some trials involved a change in one feature of an image (nose, chin, mouth, hair, or eyes for faces; chimney, porch, window, roof, or door for houses), whereas other trials involved no change. People were better able to detect the occurrence of a change for faces than for houses, but were better able to localize which feature had changed for houses than for faces. Half the trials used inverted images, a manipulation that disrupts holistic processing. With inverted images, the critical interaction between image type (faces vs. houses) and task (change detection vs. change localization) disappeared. The results suggest that holistic processing reduces change-localization abilities.

Understanding guilty pleas through the lens of social science.

The adjudication of crime by guilty plea has been on the rise globally for at least the last 30 years. Few countries, however, have accepted pleas to the degree of the United States, whose highest court recently acknowledged a criminal justice system near-synonymous with a “system of pleas, not a system of trials” (Lafler v. Cooper, 2012, p. 3). The present article provides an overview of this justice system wherein many pleas are bargained between the defense and prosecution. Our purpose here is twofold: first to review psychological and other social scientific research on the theoretical and practical reasons underlying the process of pleading guilty, and second, to identify research questions and methods that have yet to be, but need to be, asked and conducted in relation to guilty pleas.

Bluffed by the dealer: Distinguishing false pleas from false confessions

The United States convicts over 1 million people of felonies each year without affording the resources of a trial. Instead, these convictions are attained by guilty plea. The current research investigated the similarities and differences that would emerge between pleas and confessions when relying on a paradigm originally developed for confession research. The study employed a modified cheating paradigm with a 2 (innocent or guilty) × 2 (plea or confession) × 2 (evidence-bluff or no-bluff) between-participants design. We hypothesized that the evidence-bluff manipulation, which involves telling participants that there is potentially diagnostic evidence that has yet to be tested, would increase false confessions (Perillo & Kassin, 2011), but decrease false guilty pleas. The bluff manipulation should strengthen the phenomenology of innocence, which will lead the innocent to believe their confession poses no threat, but that a guilty plea would eliminate their hope of being found innocent. Although the hypothesized interaction between the evidence-bluff and plea-confession conditions on acceptance outcomes did not materialize, other evidence emerged indicating that pleas and confessions might involve different underlying processes. Specifically, innocent participants gave different reasons for refusing to sign a plea statement than they did for refusing to sign a confession statement. Similarly, the plea and confession conditions prompted guilty participants to provide significantly different reasons for agreeing to sign the statement. In conclusion, the current research provides some support for the psychological differences between pleas and confessions, while also highlighting the need for new paradigms that are specifically designed to study plea decision making.

Not separate but equal? The impact of multiple-defendant trials on juror decision-making

ABSTRACT Suspects accused of involvement in the same crime can be tried in one multiple-defendant trial. While research has long demonstrated the difficulties of being a juror, no published work has examined whether multiple-defendant trials compound these difficulties. The current research recruited both student and community samples to determine whether trying multiple defendants would increase conviction rates for individual defendants. Every participant watched one of three trial videos – a single defendant against whom the State had a strong case (single-strong), a single-defendant against whom the State had a weak case (single-weak), or a multiple-defendant trial combining both defendants (multiple-defendant). The findings demonstrated an overshare effect – when the defendants were tried together, overall conviction rates for both defendants increased relative to when they were tried alone, though the pattern of results differed by study sample. Although we are unable to provide a definitive mechanism underlying the results, the best explanation seems to be that multiple-defendant trials prompt jurors to engage in a joint evaluation of the defendants, rather than single evaluations of each. Consequently, participant-jurors’ perceptions of each defendant are impacted by how they compare with one another. Thus, the current research casts some doubt on the fairness of multiple-defendant trials.