Study sheet: Cognitive Psychology and Forensic Inference

📋 Course Outline

1. Scope, History, and Methods
2. Perception and Psychophysics
3. Attention and Working Memory
4. Long-Term Memory and Forgetting
5. Learning, Language, and Thought
6. Reasoning, Decisions, and Control
7. Social Cognition and Development
8. Eyewitness Memory and Identification
9. Interviewing and False Confessions
10. False Confession Mechanisms
11. Confession Evaluation Safeguards
12. Deception Detection Limits
13. Expert Bias and Technology
14. Cognitive Psychology and Crime
15. Forensic Inference Ladder
16. Applied Forensic Formulations
17. Core Corrections and Synthesis

📖 1. Scope, History, and Methods

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Cognitive psychology : studies how organisms acquire, select, transform, store, retrieve, and use information

★ Must-know

• A reliable experimental effect describes a change under specified conditions, a model proposes how the change may arise, a neural correlate identifies associated biology, a case formulation evaluates transfer to a person and event, and a legal conclusion applies jurisdictional rules.

• Associations do not establish direction or causation, and forensic conclusions require validated procedures, transparent uncertainty, and case-specific corroboration.

• A statistically reliable laboratory effect transfers to a forensic case only when participants, incentives, delay, stress, questioning, decision structure, plausible alternatives, and independent evidence are considered.

Further detail

• Marr distinguished computational goals, representations or algorithms, and physical implementation as interacting levels of analysis.

💡 Memory Hook

Description ≠ explanation ≠ neural correlate ≠ legal conclusion

📖 2. Perception and Psychophysics

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Perception : transforms energy at sensory receptors into action-relevant representations constrained by sensory signals, expectations, goals, learned regularities, attention, and task demands

★ Must-know

📌 Signal detection theory separates sensitivity, which indexes separation between evidence distributions, from criterion, which reflects the evidence required to respond that a signal is present.

📌 Payoffs, prevalence, instructions, fatigue, and consequences can shift response criterion without changing sensory or mnemonic sensitivity.

Further detail

• Gestalt grouping principles include:
  • proximity
  • similarity
  • good continuation
  • closure
  • common fate

📌 Predictive-processing models combine generative expectations with precision-weighted prediction errors, whereas ecological approaches emphasize information in organism–environment relations and action possibilities.

💡 Memory Hook

Sensitivity separates evidence quality from response criterion

📖 3. Attention and Working Memory

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Attention : prioritizes some information, actions, or internal representations under limited processing conditions
• Working memory : the short-term maintenance and transformation of information in service of ongoing cognition

★ Must-know

📌 Inattentional blindness is failure to report an unexpected object during another task, whereas change blindness is failure to detect an alteration across views.

• The Stroop effect occurs when an automatic or practiced word response conflicts with naming the ink color, measuring interference under a particular task mapping rather than a unitary inhibition faculty.

• Baddeley and Hitch's component model includes a central executive, phonological and visuospatial subsystems, and an episodic buffer proposed to bind information across modalities and long-term knowledge.

Further detail

• Under conditions blocking rehearsal and grouping, Cowan argued for a central working-memory capacity near three to five chunks, often expressed as about four.

💡 Memory Hook

A limited mental workspace guarded by a selective spotlight

📖 4. Long-Term Memory and Forgetting

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Long-term memory : Long-term memory comprises multiple expressions, including episodic recollection, semantic knowledge, procedural learning, priming, and conditioning, rather than a single warehouse.
• Source monitoring : the process of attributing a memory, belief, or image to an origin such as perception, imagination, another person, media, or an earlier interview

★ Must-know

📌 Episodic memory supports personally situated event recollection, whereas semantic memory supports decontextualized facts, concepts, and vocabulary.

• 🔄 Memory can be analyzed through:
  1. encoding
  2. consolidation
  3. storage
  4. retrieval

📌 Recollection provides contextual detail, whereas familiarity provides a graded sense of prior occurrence without recovered context.

Further detail

• Ebbinghaus's self-study of nonsense-syllable learning showed rapid early forgetting followed by slower change in savings, but it used one observer, one material type, and one dependent measure.

💡 Memory Hook

Encoding → consolidation → retrieval → reconstruction

📖 5. Learning, Language, and Thought

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Schema : organizes recurrent knowledge and supports rapid inference, but it can also fill gaps with typical information and create intrusions or stereotype-consistent interpretations

★ Must-know

• Classical conditioning learns predictive relations among events, whereas operant learning changes action tendencies through consequences.

• Reinforcement-learning models distinguish cached model-free values from model-based planning, but real behavior can combine both with habits, episodic memory, instruction, and social norms.

• Language can make distinctions habitual, provide labels that support memory, and direct attention, but strong claims that language determines what a person can think are unsupported.

Further detail

📌 Punishment can suppress an action without teaching an alternative and can produce avoidance or concealment.

📌 Leading questions can change judgment through response bias, interpretation, or mnemonic change, and these mechanisms must be distinguished experimentally.

💡 Memory Hook

Schemas and language guide attention → interpretation → action

📖 6. Reasoning, Decisions, and Control

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Heuristic : a strategy that reduces search or computation and can produce systematic errors in designed tasks while remaining efficient in some environments
• Executive functions : control processes that maintain goals, update working memory, inhibit prepotent responses, shift task sets, plan, and monitor action

★ Must-know

📌 The prosecutor's fallacy confuses the probability of evidence given innocence with the probability of innocence given the evidence.

• Dual-process theories commonly distinguish fast, autonomous, often associative processing from slower, working-memory-dependent, hypothetical reasoning, but System 1 and System 2 are umbrella labels rather than anatomical systems.

Further detail

📌 Metacognitive calibration compares confidence with accuracy, whereas resolution asks whether confidence distinguishes correct from incorrect responses within a person.

💡 Memory Hook

Fast processing can be skilled; deliberation can still rationalize

📖 7. Social Cognition and Development

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Hostile attribution bias : a tendency to infer hostile intent from ambiguous provocation and is a probabilistic correlate of aggressive behavior, particularly reactive aggression

★ Must-know

• Contemporary developmental evidence favors gradual, domain-specific, and variable change over a rigid stage ladder, although Piaget's stages and Vygotsky's emphasis on language, culture, guidance, and the zone of proximal development remain historically important.

• Cognitive tasks can characterize function but do not independently diagnose most disorders; diagnosis requires symptoms, history, examination, collateral information, course, and validity.

• A group association, developmental average, or diagnostic label must not be converted directly into an opinion about an individual's memory accuracy, control, truthfulness, intent, or risk.

Further detail

• 🔄 Social information processing can involve:

  1. cue encoding
  2. interpretation
  3. goal clarification
  4. response generation
  5. evaluation
  6. enactment

• Moral disengagement includes:

  • moral justification
  • euphemistic labeling
  • displacement or diffusion of responsibility
  • minimizing consequences
  • dehumanization
  • victim blaming

💡 Memory Hook

Context, development, and culture shape cognition → behavior

📖 8. Eyewitness Memory and Identification

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Eyewitness memory : reflects what was encoded, remained accessible, was retrieved by available cues, and was interpreted and recorded, so reconstructive memory can still be accurate for some details

★ Must-know

• Estimator variables arise outside justice-system control, whereas system variables can be controlled through instructions, fillers, administrator knowledge, recording, feedback, repeated testing, and showup procedures.

• A fair lineup contains one suspect and fillers fitting the witness's description so that the suspect does not stand out, uses culprit-absent instructions, records the choice and immediate confidence verbatim, and documents the procedure.

• Initial, uncontaminated confidence after a fair lineup can be strongly informative for an adult suspect identification, whereas later confidence can be inflated by feedback, repeated identification, discussion, courtroom preparation, delay, or learning that the suspect was charged.

Further detail

• Loftus and Palmer found that collision-question wording changed mean speed estimates and that the word smashed produced more reports of nonexistent broken glass than other wording.

💡 Memory Hook

Encoding → retention → retrieval → procedure → confidence

📖 9. Interviewing and False Confessions

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• False confession : a statement that does not accurately express the person's involvement, and confession decisions can be shaped by uncertainty, custody, sanctions, interview duration, incentives, and interviewer tactics

📝 Essential Points

• An evidence-based witness interview builds rapport, explains ground rules, elicits an uninterrupted free report, uses open prompts, follows the witness's account, avoids presuppositions, separates sources, and records exact wording.

• The cognitive interview combines mental context reinstatement, report-everything instructions, witness-compatible questioning, and sometimes varied retrieval, but reverse order and change perspective are not universally beneficial.

• Cognitive-interview protocols generally increase correct detail relative to comparison interviews but can also increase incorrect detail, so more information is not synonymous with more truth.

• Descriptive false-confession frameworks distinguish voluntary false confessions, coerced-compliant confessions made for immediate benefit or escape from harm, and coerced-internalized confessions in which a person comes to doubt memory or accept possible guilt.

• Safeguards against false confessions include audiovisual recording from the beginning of custody, appropriate rights procedures, access to counsel or an appropriate adult, time limits and breaks, restrictions on coercive tactics, and information-gathering interviewing.

💡 Memory Hook

More information ≠ more truth; confession ≠ truth detection

📖 10. False Confession Mechanisms

★ Must-know

• The framework distinguishes three descriptive types:
  • Voluntary false confessions made without direct interrogation pressure
  • Coerced-compliant confessions made to obtain an immediate benefit or escape harm while privately disbelieving guilt
  • Coerced- or pressured-internalized confessions in which the person comes to doubt memory or accept possible guilt

📌 Voluntary, compliant, and internalized confession types are descriptive frameworks with disputed boundaries, not diagnostic categories, so analysis should prioritize observable mechanisms, vulnerabilities, tactics, contamination, statement evolution, contemporaneous records, and corroboration.

Further detail

• Established risk factors include:
  • Lengthy or isolating questioning
  • Fatigue and sleep deprivation
  • Minimization or implied leniency
  • Explicit or implicit threats
  • Permitted false-evidence ploys
  • Contamination with nonpublic facts
  • Adolescence
  • Intellectual or communication disability
  • Mental disorder in some contexts
  • Suggestibility, compliance, and limited understanding of rights

💡 Memory Hook

Immediate compliance differs from internalized doubt.

📖 11. Confession Evaluation Safeguards

★ Must-know

• 🔄 Confession evaluation should proceed by:

  1. Reconstructing what the suspect knew before questioning
  2. Tracing how the account evolved
  3. Assessing custody and questioning conditions
  4. Checking independent corroboration
  5. Testing alternative hypotheses

• Safeguards include:

  • Complete audiovisual recording from the beginning of custody through the statement
  • Developmentally and cognitively appropriate rights procedures
  • Access to counsel or an appropriate adult
  • Time limits and breaks
  • Prohibition or restriction of coercive tactics
  • Information-gathering interviewing

Further detail

• Systematic-review evidence indicates that information-gathering approaches produce more true confessions and fewer false confessions on average than accusatorial approaches in laboratory studies, although field ground truth remains difficult.

💡 Memory Hook

Know first, trace change, assess conditions, corroborate, test alternatives.

📖 12. Deception Detection Limits

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Polygraph : National Research Council, The polygraph and lie detection, 2003 — records autonomic responses during a questioning procedure, but arousal is not deception and performance depends on technique, target population, countermeasures, examiner, and base rate

📝 Essential Points

• People perform only modestly above chance when judging deception across heterogeneous laboratory studies, and gaze aversion, fidgeting, nervousness, and delayed answers are not uniquely caused by lying.

📌 A scientifically responsible deception opinion evaluates specific propositions and alternative explanations rather than labeling a person deceptive, because truthful memories can vary and rehearsed lies can be consistent.

💡 Memory Hook

Arousal is not deception, and consistency is not truth.

📖 13. Expert Bias and Technology

★ Must-know

• Methods that can discriminate conditions in some controlled studies include:

  • fMRI
  • EEG/P300
  • Eye tracking
  • Voice analysis
  • Automated behavior classification

• Stronger debiasing safeguards include:

  • Linear sequential unmasking
  • Blind verification
  • Pre-specified task-relevance rules
  • Independent notes
  • Calibrated conclusion scales
  • Proficiency testing
  • Disclosure of uncertainty

Further detail

• These technologies face construct-validity, movement and artifact, countermeasure, population-shift, adversarial-behavior, privacy, and individual-error problems, while legal admissibility and ethical acceptability remain separate from statistical performance.

💡 Memory Hook

Context and organizational pressure → confirmation, conformity, and amplified error.

📖 14. Cognitive Psychology and Crime

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Cognitive Psychology : provides intermediate descriptions between brain measurements and complex conduct, including attention to threat, reward learning, working-memory maintenance, social interpretation, delay discounting, moral disengagement, and action control

📝 Essential Points

📌 Crime is a legal and social category containing heterogeneous acts, so explanations must incorporate opportunity, coercion, deprivation, peers, norms, substances, trauma, mental state, skill, learning history, institutions, and the specific offense.

💡 Memory Hook

A cognitive profile is not a criminal brain.

📖 15. Forensic Inference Ladder

📝 Essential Points

• 🔄 The forensic inference ladder proceeds from:
  1. A task score produced by a person, procedure, and context
  2. A construct supported by reliability and construct validity
  3. An individual explanation based on history and alternatives
  4. A legally relevant conclusion based on the governing standard and temporally relevant evidence

📌 Cognitive science can inform procedure and contextualize evidence but should not stigmatize groups, infer guilt from a profile, promise mind reading, or replace behavioral and legal analysis with a mechanistic story.

💡 Memory Hook

Task observation → construct → individual explanation → legal conclusion.

📖 16. Applied Forensic Formulations

★ Must-know

• In a high-confidence lineup case, immediate high confidence after a fair and uncontaminated first identification supports diagnostic value, whereas confidence that rises after feedback or confirmation is contaminated.

• The evaluation should reconstruct:

  • Custody
  • Sleep
  • Breaks
  • Rights comprehension
  • Supports
  • Threats or promises
  • False evidence
  • Contamination
  • Statement evolution
  • Independent discoveries

• Low inhibition and working-memory scores obtained months after an offense may describe current functioning if validity and norms are adequate, but they do not establish the person's state at the offense, inability to control conduct, intent, or future violence.

Further detail

• A cognitive interview that produces thirty new details, three conflicting with video, should be evaluated by comparing correct, incorrect, and unverifiable information with a baseline interview rather than treating increased detail as proof of success or failure.

📖 17. Core Corrections and Synthesis

📝 Essential Points

• Memory preserves useful information through selective encoding and cue-dependent reconstruction rather than recording events like a camera, so accuracy varies across details and retrieval conditions.

• Working-memory capacity estimates depend on chunk definition, task, modality, attention, knowledge, strategy, interference, and model, so neither exactly seven nor exactly four items is universal. — Miller, The magical number seven, plus or minus two, 1956

• Immediate confidence after a fair, uncontaminated first eyewitness identification can be informative, whereas later confidence is vulnerable to feedback and repetition.

• Crime is multiply determined and legally defined, so cognitive findings require developmental, social, situational, clinical, and institutional context.

• Forensic conclusions should state what was measured, under which conditions, compared with which alternatives, with what uncertainty, and how far the conclusion travels beyond the data.

💡 Memory Hook

Transparent procedures and calibrated uncertainty → stronger forensic conclusions.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Cognitive Evidence Levels

Level	What it does	What it does not establish
Experimental effect	Describes a reliable change under specified conditions	Does not automatically explain a case
Model	Proposes how an effect may arise	Does not prove its mechanism
Neural correlate	Identifies associated biology	Does not establish causation
Case formulation	Evaluates transfer to a person and event	Does not replace legal rules

Forensic Inference Levels

Level	Question	Required support
Task observation	What did the person do under these conditions?	Reliable measurement and procedure
Construct	What capability or process does it represent?	Construct validity
Individual explanation	Why did this person perform that way?	History and alternative explanations
Legal conclusion	What does it mean under the governing standard?	Temporally relevant evidence and legal criteria