How downplaying or exaggerating crime severity in a confession affects perceived guilt.

This study investigates how judgments of guilt are influenced by factual errors in confessions that either amplify or downplay the severity of the crime. Participants read a confession statement and police report in which either the confession was consistent with the police report, the suspect admitted to a worse crime or the suspect admitted to a lesser crime. Mediation analyses showed that, compared to consistent confessions, both types of directional errors reduced judgments of guilt. Inconsistencies that made the suspect look better - but not those that made the suspect look worse -also increased judgments of guilt via a direct effect. Confessions that contain errors that appear to exaggerate the severity of the crime prompt no higher judgments of suspect guilt; however, errors in confessions that are perceived to downplay the severity of the crime can prompt an increased perception of suspect guilt compared to a consistent confession.

Acute Physical Exercise Can Influence the Accuracy of Metacognitive Judgments.

Acute exercise generally benefits memory but little research has examined how exercise affects metacognition (knowledge of memory performance). We show that a single bout of exercise can influence metacognition in paired-associate learning. Participants completed 30-min of moderate-intensity exercise before or after studying a series of word pairs (cloud-ivory), and completed cued-recall (cloud-?; Experiments 1 & 2) and recognition memory tests (cloud-? spoon; ivory; drill; choir; Experiment 2). Participants made judgments of learning prior to cued-recall tests (JOLs; predicted likelihood of recalling the second word of each pair when shown the first) and feeling-of-knowing judgments prior to recognition tests (FOK; predicted likelihood of recognizing the second word from four alternatives). Compared to no-exercise control conditions, exercise before encoding enhanced cued-recall in Experiment 1 but not Experiment 2 and did not affect recognition. Exercise after encoding did not influence memory. In conditions where exercise did not benefit memory, it increased JOLs and FOK judgments relative to accuracy (Experiments 1 & 2) and impaired the relative accuracy of JOLs (ability to distinguish remembered from non-remembered items; Experiment 2). Acute exercise seems to signal likely remembering; this has implications for understanding the effects of exercise on metacognition, and for incorporating exercise into study routines.

Undermining position effects in choices from arrays, with implications for police lineups.

Choices from arrays are often characterized by position effects, such as edge-aversion. We investigated position effects when participants attempted to pick a suspect from an array similar to a police photo lineup. A reanalysis of data from 2 large-scale field studies showed that choices made under realistic conditions-closely matching eyewitness identification decisions in police investigations-displayed edge-aversion and bias to choose from the top row (Study 1). In a series of experiments (Studies 2a-2c and 3), participants guessing the location of a suspect exhibited edge-aversion regardless of whether the lineup was constructed to maximize the chances of the suspect being picked, to ensure the suspect did not stand out, or randomly. Participants favored top locations only when the lineup was constructed to maximize the chances of the suspect being picked. In Studies 4 and 5, position effects disappeared when (a) response options were presented in an array with no obvious center, edges, or corners, and (b) instructions stated that the suspect was placed randomly. These findings show that position effects are influenced by a combination of task instructions and array shape. Randomizing the location of the suspect and modifying the shape of the lineup array may reduce misidentification. (PsycINFO Database Record