title: A cross-modal weapon focus effect: The influence of a weapon's presence on memory for auditory information.
abstract: To examine whether a weapon's presence impairs witnesses' memory for auditory information (as it impairs memory for visual information), we conducted two experiments in which undergraduates watched one version of a videotape depicting a male target who held either a weapon or a neutral object and conversed with a female character. The semantic content of his remarks was either easy or difficult to comprehend. The weapon's presence did not affect voice identification accuracy or memory for the target's vocal characteristics (e.g., pitch, loudness, speech rate) but did worsen memory for semantic content in the Difficult Comprehension condition. Our results can be explained by multiple resource models of attention, which propose separate resource "pools" for different sensory modalities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Science, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, USA. kpickel@bsu.edu
authors.forename: Kerri L
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Pickel
authors.forename: Tricia A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: French
authors.forename: Jessica M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Betts
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D005389:Firearms; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014743:Videotape Recording; D014831:Voice