Originally published: . Volume 2, No. 9. Source pages: 1, 7, 8, 9.
How our minds work, how we retrieve “facts” and judge reality, and how we learn and reach decisions is one of the most fascinating areas of human behavior, impacting lives at every level of society and in every area of human performance. At LSU’s Office of Applied Cognition (OAC) cofounder Dr. Sean Lane and his team of researchers unravel the intricate knots between perception, attention, memory, judgments, and decision-making, and they work to apply these to real-life situations. Along with cofounder and LSU Chair Dr. Robert Matthews, the team seeks to bridge the gap between laboratory findings and real world, and to make a difference where it really counts.
“Most researchers do either basic or applied research, “ Dr. Sean Lane explained to the Times. “We take a different approach. Our theoretically-driven work is conducted in both in vivo (naturalistic) and in vitro (laboratory) settings….” This focus on real-world situations helps OAC researchers better understand the mechanisms underlying thinking and remembering, while providing a means to improve human performance in these settings.
Part of Sean’s insights for applied settings comes from his varied background. Before coming to LSU, and after starting a doctoral program in applied experimental as a professor at the U. of Nevada in Las Vegas, he worked in Silicon Valley. It was during the booming dot com era. “I primarily did research in human factors,” he said. And, “…was the Director of a User Experience group that included User Interface Designers, Graphic Designers and Information Architects. We designed web sites and software.”
But Sean missed directing his own research and so came to LSU in 2002.
At LSU his group has five major research areas. These are eyewitness memory, memory errors, education/learning/teache r expertise, experience- based (implicit) learning, and medical cognition. In these main areas the researchers push to undercover the often puzzling and counterintuitive findings regarding the quirkiness of our minds. Although Sean works in all these areas, he has long- standing interests in the topics of eyewitness suggestibility, eyewitness identification, and beliefs about eyewitness memory.
Eyewitness Memory
In 1979 Elizabeth Loftus’ research in eyewitness testimony and false memories exploded myths about the accuracy of peoples’ testimony about events, opening the door to major advancements in cognitive science that was to last for decades.
The current finding is that 75 percent of those individuals who are later proved innocent by DNA evidence have been wrongly convicted on the basis of flawed eyewitness testimony (The Innocence Project). This supports Dr. Ronald Fisher’s comment in the recent “Special Issue on Psychology and Law” (Current Directions, APS). Fisher, a friend of Sean’s, wrote, “Is there any institution that defines a culture more than its legal system? If not, then applying principles of psychology to understand and to enhance that system may be one of the noblest applications of our profession.”
Eyewitness’ memories are influenced by information that the witness is exposed to from other people, from media, from law enforcement, attorneys or counselors. This has been established, along with the role of imagery in creating false memories.
However, Sean noted, “…one issue that had not been addressed by previous research is whether it is the act of generating information that creates false memories or whether it is simply exposure to such details.”
In one of their studies, the OAC researchers had people “witness” a mock crime, and later answered a series of questions about the event that included misleading information and details that had not been seen. Then researchers had participants do one of two things. Either they were required to generate details of what they had observed, or simply read details about the event. While “generation” increased the amount of accurate memory, it increased false memories as well. And also, generation increased the claim of having a vivid (but false) recollection.
The team also studies the basic memory functions that are involved in eyewitness identification from line-ups. “…we have attempted to understand how people make identification or lineup rejection [“not present”] decisions in terms of strategies that have been intensively studied in the basic memory literature,” Sean noted. For example, basic memory research has shown that sometimes people can decide they did not see something by recalling a related item they did see. This is called recall to reject strategy. “Overall,” he noted, “our results have shown that these strategies vary in effectiveness, and in some cases can be quite diagnostic of accuracy.”
In real-world settings it is not what experts believe or know about eyewitness testimony that makes the final difference in accuracy, but the belief or behavior of the jurors.
“One key factor affecting jurors’ decisions,” noted Sean, “are the beliefs they hold about eyewitness memory…” He explained that although there have been survey studies on that topic, an important area that has not been studied thoroughly is how jurors actually behave when faced with a relevant legal situation, and how their beliefs impact their decisions regarding the testimony of an eyewitness.
“This is a reasonable question,” Sean commented, “because psychological research has documented that people do not always act in accordance with their beliefs, do not always apply what they have learned in one situation to another, and can learn and perform tasks correctly with little explicit knowledge of the features they are relying upon, called implicit learning.”
In one study at the OAC, researchers compared people’s belief about the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, to their actual judgments after viewing transcripts or vignettes. “Although participants were sensitive to a number of factors in their evaluation of eyewitnesses,” Sean noted, “their performance on the transcripts did not correlate with the survey responses for most issues.” Sean said that, “…the field needs to develop measures that assess this knowledge more effectively.”
Sean explained to the Times that while he has consulted in some eyewitness cases, the Louisiana Supreme Court appears to have limited experts in this area. “In many ways,” he said, “this is a seemingly odd outcome as many states are going in the opposite direction and routinely allowing such testimony in criminal courts. That said, I think the greatest benefit to our legal system would involve working with law enforcement. The National Institute of Justice has suggested a set of low-cost changes that, if adopted, would likely reduce false identifications,” he explained. “If we can reduce such errors early in the system rather than at the time of trial, it would be much better.”
Memory Errors
Sean’s team uses Maria Johnson’s “Source Monitoring Framework” to guide their work in learning how people discriminate between memories that are accurate and those that are false. According to the model, the mind works to weigh certain types of information in a memory trace, makes comparisons between what is expected and what is actually retrieved, and evaluates the consistency or plausibility of what is retrieved.
“A recent line of research was motivated by the repeated finding in the false memory literature that although false memories are often vividly remembered, they are usually less vivid and detailed on average than accurate memories. For us,” he said, “this brought up the question of how people set the criteria for their source decisions and whether the accuracy of such decisions could be improved by selecting more diagnostic features.”
Sean said that he is probably most proud of his research that examines how people’s assumptions about a memory task influence their accuracy.
“Any time someone tries to remember something,” he explained, “– a fact on a test, which person at work told you about funny joke, or what a perpetrator did when they took your money — they have assumptions, whether they realize it or not, about what types of information will be most important to remember, what kinds of memories they will have to discriminate between, etc.”
“Our lab has helped provide evidence that such assumptions can be wrong and that we can help direct people so that their assumptions become more accurate. Most importantly, he said, this updating helps improve the accuracy of their memory decisions. For example, we have people “witness” a mock crime, and they subsequently answer questions that contain misleading information. Later, they take a memory test and have to distinguish between things they witnessed and things they only read about afterwards.” This emerged from a study by Sean and researchers Cristine Roussel, Diana Villa and Shelby Morita.
“So here’s the interesting part,” Sean said. “We give them an initial test and afterwards give them feedback by telling them the actual source of each item. When we give them a second test with brand new items, they reduce their errors by over 50%! Furthermore, most of these participants do not think the feedback helped them do any better on the second test.”
The group is currently conducting a number of studies to expand on these important findings, along with their ongoing work in dual- mind, medical errors, and other studies. “There is also some new and exciting research going in the lab on the topics of emotional arousal and memory, and the impact of lying on memory,” said Sean.
What does Dr. Sean Lane enjoy most about his work? “First, and foremost,” he said, “working with my collaborators. Bob Mathews was instrumental in bringing me to LSU and I could not ask for a better collaborator. Our work together has ranged from implicit learning to ways of helping teachers obtain greater expertise, and we have been successful in obtaining several NSF grants for our work. In addition,” he said, “I love working with my graduate students.” Sean currently advises five graduate students: Tanya Karam, Stephanie Groft, Leslie Butler, Kathleen Vieira, and Serena Fisher, and also works with Bob Mathews’ students Jon Tall and Patrick Leget. “They are funny, smart and talented,” he said, “and it would be impossible to do the range of research we do without their hard work.”
The OAC, founded in 2004 by Drs. Robert Mathews and Sean Lane, is housed in the Department of Psychology, LSU Baton Rouge campus. Find more information at http://www.lsu.edu/psychology/oac/ (and follow their blog at http://lsuoac.blogspot.com/)
OAC team at the 2010 American Psychology-Law Society Conference in Vancouver, BC. L to R: Stephanie Groft, Leslie Ann Butler, Dr. Sean Lane, and Tanya Karam.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.