The Influence of Threat and Unusual Context on the Weapon Focus Effect in Virtual Reality

초록

The weapon focus effect (WFE) states that eyewitnesses to crimes involving weapons focus more on weapons than on details of the perpetrator or the crime scene. We will investigate the two main hypothesized causes of the WFE: unusualness and threat. Using the virtual reality (VR) software NeuroVR, we will expose participants to scenes of a perpetrator (butcher) threatening, or kindly interacting, with a woman (customer or teacher) with a weapon (butcher knife) in a meat market or a classroom. With VR, we will provide a more immersive experience of witnessing the crime, not just watching a screen. We will then test memory and target identification performance. Expected results are decreased memory and identification performance, with increased memory of the weapon, in both threat conditions and both classroom conditions, but not in the non-threat meat market condition. We expect the greatest WFE when threat and unusualness overlap. This will demonstrate that both are acting factors of the WFE, not one or the other, and that when both factors are present, the effect strength is maximized.