Recently, a number of researchers have emphasized the impact that beliefs about mental processes can have on the legal process. Research on metamemory (e.g. people's understanding of and control over memory) is therefore critical for understanding how jurors might incorrectly weigh evidence. Particularly important are situations where beliefs about mental functioning diverge from people's actual capabilities. Recent research has demonstrated that people are unaware of visual information that they do not attend to, and that they typically attend to a very small proportion of visual information in a given scene. One particularly striking manifestation of this failure occurs when subjects have difficulty detecting large between-view visual changes. This finding is referred to as "change blindness" (CB), and it occurs regardless of whether the subject is actively searching for changes, and even when the changing object is the current focus of the subject's attention. In part, interest in these findings is based on the degree to which they conflict with intuition - many people are incredulous when they discover that seemingly obvious changes are missed by subjects. Three sets of experiments in this proposal explore visual metacognition, documenting the scope of incorrect beliefs about visual information processing. A first set of experiments tests the degree to which beliefs about visual organization and intention underlie this metacognitive errors in vision. In these experiments, subjects will make estimates about changes to well organized natural scenes, jumbled scenes, and object arrays. A second set of experiments compares predictions about picture memory with predictions about on-line visual processes such as change detection to determine why subjects underestimate their performance in the former case, while they overestimate their performance in the latter case. The final experiments in this proposal explore the possibility that inaccurate visual metacognition can lead jurors to misevaluate evidence in criminal and civil cases. Just as incorrect beliefs about the confidence-accuracy correlation can lead jurors to misjudge eyewitness evidence, inaccurate beliefs about vision may lead them to misunderstand what someone "should have seen."
