Weapon focus is the concentration on a weapon by a witness of a crime and the subsequent inability to accurately remember other details of the crime. Weapon focus is a factor that heavily affects the reliability of eyewitness testimony. This effect involves a witness to a crime diverting their attention to the weapon the perpetrator is holding, thus causing memory impairments and leaving less attention for other details in the scene, such as the attacker's face, clothing or vehicle.
Several studies support the notion of weapon focus, particularly in terms of greater attention paid to the weapon and its effects on recognition and recall. Elizabeth Loftus, Yuille and Burns have all been associated with studies showing the existence of a weapon focus effect.
Background information
In the field of forensic psychology, researchers have validated the weapon focus effect and shown that a witness will remember less about a crime, or the perpetrator of a crime, when a weapon is present, as opposed to if the weapon is not present at an identical crime. As for the reason of the phenomenon, the two leading explanations attribute it to the cognitive arousal of the witness, or to the overall unusualness of the situation.
In one of the earliest known investigations of weapon focus, Johnson and Scott (1976) had two groups of participants come into what they thought was a laboratory study of human memory. In actuality, they were to take part in a simulated interaction intended to determine whether the presence of a weapon would influence eyewitness memory for an event. Participants in the control condition sat in a waiting room where they overheard a conversation between two people following which a man exited with greasy hands and a grease pen. In the weapon condition, participants sat in the same waiting room, but instead they heard a violent argument – including furniture being thrown around – following which a man came out holding a blood-stained knife. During a photo line-up, the control participants were more likely to accurately identify the man they saw in the waiting room relative to participants in the weapon condition (49% versus 33% correct identifications).
In 1979, initially Loftus postulated that it is an expected occurrence in the event where an individual is highly aroused, such as in the case of a frightening situation. This suggestion was criticized for its lack of supporting evidence, so its author conducted several studies in 1987 and finally demonstrated the viability of weapon focus. The study conducted by Johnson and Scott (1976) represents one of the few early simulation studies available, likely due to the ethical issues surrounding the exposure of research participants to a putatively threatening scenario. For this reason much of the research conducted on the weapon focus effect has made use of videos or slideshows. In one of the first such experiments, Loftus, Loftus and Messo (1987) had participants watch a video in which a young man approached the counter of a fast food restaurant, presented an object to the cashier, accepted money and left. In the control condition the man presented a cheque to the cashier whereas in the weapon condition the man presented a gun. Specialized equipment tracked the participant's gaze as they viewed the video to determine with what frequency (and for how long) they fixated upon the item of interest (the cheque or the gun). Relative to the control condition, participants in the weapon condition looked at the item the man was holding more frequently and for greater duration. Further, when tested for the details of the event, performance was better for the control condition relative to the weapon condition - with the exception that participants in the weapon condition were more likely to recall what object the man was holding (a gun).
Another significant challenge to the studies on the weapon focus effect has been their ecological validity. Specifically, many theorists have argued that the effect is limited to the laboratory design. These claims have been supported by the relative absence of applied evidence supporting the effect. Several reports have been published looking for evidence of a weapon focus effect using records of actual crimes. According to the laboratory findings summarized above, the prediction had been that eyewitness memory would be worse for weapon crimes compared to non-weapon crimes. Many primary studies have failed to support this prediction. Even so, a recent meta-analysis conducted by Fawcett et al. (2013) has demonstrated that when the data for all of the applied studies are combined, there is a small but reliable effect suggesting that weapon presence impairs actual eyewitness memory. This is extremely significant when one considers how jurors tend to overvalue eyewitness testimony. This finding adds to the ecological validity of the laboratory studies conducted on this topic. One reason why this effect's ecological validity may be hard to support could be the difficulty in testing this effect on actual eyewitnesses and their memory of a crime.
On the other hand, a study published in 2004 found the opposite when confronted with weapon focus. It found that the exposure to firearms was associated with significantly better eyewitness descriptions especially regarding basic features such as gender, height, build, age, and ethnicity.
Causes of weapon focus
A leading explanation for a cause of weapon focus is the unusualness of the situation, being a witness to a crime. Since the initial research conducted by Johnson and Scott (1976) and Loftus et al. (1987), others have demonstrated a similar effect using unusual objects rather than weapons. These findings are described as the "Unusual Item Hypothesis." This effect is seen when an object does not fit with the schema of the situation. Attention is then drawn to the out-of-place object and less attention is paid to other objects in the scene making recalling these other objects more difficult. This effect was observed in Toronto in 1997 when a robber entered a coffee shop and demanded money while threatening to strangle a goose he was holding if he did not receive the money. Meanwhile, the customers were too focused on the strangeness of a goose in the coffee shop to observe any details about the perpetrator himself. This effect has also been observed in the lab. For example, Pickel (1998) demonstrated an effect comparable to weapon focus using a video in which a man approached a cashier and presented a whole raw chicken or miniature Pillsbury Dough Boy instead of an expected item such as a wallet. From her finding, Pickel (1998) argued that the weapon focus arose from the unusual nature of the object in the relation to the context in which it was presented. Another study by Mansour et al. (2018) presented subjects with a video of a crime scene. From their findings, subjects remembered more about a scene when a crime was committed with a binder, which represented an ordinary object, compared to unusual objects such as a gun or knife. This was also seen in a study done in 2013 which examined weapon focus, and determined whether or not a gun automatically engages visual attention. There were two experiments that were conducted, which included targets that either depicted a gun, or another object. The conclusion of this experiment was that images of a gun did not engage attention more than that of images of other objects, including a tomato and a pocket watch. It was discovered that in order for an object to be viewed as threatening, the environment and context of the situation is of utmost importance. The context of the situation will ultimately determine whether or not weapon focus is existent in an instance of eyewitness testimony. Furthermore, in her article, Kerri L. Pickel determined that the peculiarity of an object is a reason for the weapon focus effect. Being unusual attracts more attention to the weapon, but the object does not necessarily have to be a weapon to produce this effect. This contributes to the idea that the context of the situation has more importance than the actual weapon a victim witnesses. The mere unusual aspect of a situation with a foreign object is enough to elicit the weapon focus response.
In their 2013 meta-analysis, Fawcett et al. (2013) presented the issues surrounding the arousal/threat hypothesis. This is one of the oldest explanations connected to the weapon focus phenomenon, and relies on the Yerkes-Dodson law that links arousal and performance; emotionally arousing states, such as stress, can enhance performance up to a point, but after this there are detrimental impacts on cognitive functions, like memory and learning. The amygdala, a brain region located near the center of the brain, is responsible for fear processing and emotional response to both negative and positive stimuli. Research by Sander and Grafman has suggested that the amygdala serves to not only process fear-inducing stimuli but also to determine which information is relevant for encoding. This suggests that the amygdala plays a role in determining what to pay attention to during the crime. In situations where a weapon is present, witnesses tend to focus on the object of arousal and miss peripheral details, like the identity of the perpetrator. This explanation relies on Easterbrook's (1959) theory that stress causes a reduction in mental resources, thus the range of cues a subject can attend to in this situation will be significantly reduced. In a dangerous situation where a weapon is present, survival becomes the most important facets and peripheral information is overlooked. This means that the witness has a heightened memory for the weapon, but may struggle to recall other information. Over time, research into the role of anxiety on weapon focus has produced inconsistent findings, causing researchers to look at alternative causes of the phenomenon. The relative contributions of both arousal and unusualness remain one of the primary theoretical issues in this literature, with some authors arguing for a contribution of both.
Another potential cause of weapon focus is the "automatic capture" explanation. This suggests that the attention paid to a weapon is automatic and unintentional. Studies have been performed that show that even if a subject is asked to ignore specific stimuli they are unable to, thus indicating an automatic response. Remington et al. (1992) conclude that a participant might intend to ignore an event, but their attention is often automatically captured by it - as such, an eyewitness may not intend to solely focus on a weapon, but if their diversion of attention to it cannot be controlled, they possess little ability to ignore it. Yantis and Jonides (1996) suggest that it makes adaptive sense for humans to divert attention towards new objects, as a new representation has to be created for that object, presenting another explanation for the weapon focus phenomenon. However, they also conclude that attention focus is not automatic and can be directed on command, especially if attention is already focused somewhere specific. If attention is already focused away from a certain stimulus, then automatic capture is avoidable.
Differences in weapon focus effects Differences in eyewitness memory can be attributed to whether the perpetrator holding a weapon is consistent with the eyewitness's schema. People use schemas to organize knowledge and provide a basis for future understanding. Researcher Kerri Pickel posits that if the object held by the target falls in line with the witness's schema, they will not divert as much attention to it and the characteristics of the perpetrator will be encoded normally - it is only when the combination of the perpetrator and the object is not consistent with the schema that the weapon focus effect will be significant in distorting memory.