Facial Recognition: Weapon Effect and Attentional Focus

The present experiment investigated the hypothesis that a weapon can serve as a cue that will interfere with the eyewitness’ encoding of the weapon‐holder's facial features. Extrapolating from Easterbrook's cue utilization hypothesis, an interaction between arousal and attentional focus was predicted. White female college students played a bogus visual discrimination game in which they saw a total of 24 target photos: six black targets holding a weapon in their hands, six white targets holding weapons, six black targets holding objects other than weapons, and six white targets holding objects other than weapons. Subjects were randomly assigned to view the photos while experiencing white noise and threat of electric shock (high arousal) or without such factors (low arousal). Subjects were also randomly assigned to one of four attentional focus levels: face focus, hand focus, background focus, and free focus. A signal detection‐type task provided an assessment of identification accuracy. The data revealed a significant “weapon effect”: Subjects were better at identifying photos of targets who were not holding a weapon than they were at identifying photos of targets who were holding a weapon. Focus of attention and race of target also significantly affected recognition accuracy, as did arousal in one of two analyses. No support was found, however, for the predicted interaction between arousal and attentional focus. Finally, subjects showed a strong criterion shift according to the race of target; they were much more likely to make a “seen before” response to other‐race (black) faces than to same‐race faces.