By Kathy Pezdek | The Marshall Project | August 13, 2015

The scenario is all too familiar. A police officer with a dash-cam or body camera stops an individual, the situation escalates, the individual is apprehended, a charge is made and the individual is arrested. The question is whether prior to being questioned or even prior to writing a report, should the officer be permitted to view the recorded footage?

Philip Eure, the Department of Investigation’s Inspector General for the NYPD, recently recommended that police officers be prevented from viewing recorded footage before giving a statement to investigators. Quick to respond, New York’s City Police Commissioner, Bill Bratton called this “one of the recommendations of the I.G. that we strongly, strongly disagree with and will not support under any circumstance.” His concern was enhancing the integrity of police officers; “I am not intending to use the cameras to play a game of gotcha with the cops.”

This is a complex issue, but one for which cognitive science research provides a clear answer. If the purpose of any investigation is to get the most complete, accurate information possible, then it could be argued that the officer should view the footage, probably multiple times, prior to being questioned and prior to testifying. Human memory is notoriously flawed, but we can consider recorded footage to be “ground truth.” So according to this argument, bolstering the officer’s account by having him view the recorded footage effectively serves to enhance the accuracy of the officer’s report. And it does.

The problem is that in so doing, two independent lines of evidence – the officer’s eyewitness memory and the recorded footage – are no longer two independent lines of evidence. That is, the eyewitness memory of the officer has been tainted by viewing the recorded footage. If in the prosecution of the case the officer is to serve as an eyewitness, and his memory is to be preserved untainted, then it is critical that the officer not view the footage. Continue reading »

By Kevin P. Madore, Donna Rose Addis, and Daniel L. Schacter | Psychological Science | July 23, 2015

Abstract:

People produce more episodic details when imagining future events and solving means-end problems after receiving an episodic-specificity induction—brief training in recollecting details of a recent event—than after receiving a control induction not focused on episodic retrieval. Here we show for the first time that an episodic-specificity induction also enhances divergent creative thinking. In Experiment 1, participants exhibited a selective boost on a divergent-thinking task (generating unusual uses of common objects) after a specificity induction compared with a control induction; by contrast, performance following the two inductions was similar on an object association task thought to involve little divergent thinking. In Experiment 2, we replicated the specificity-induction effect on divergent thinking using a different control induction, and also found that participants performed similarly on a convergent-thinking task following the two inductions. These experiments provide novel evidence that episodic memory is involved in divergent creative thinking.

Read the full article here.

By Roland G. Benoit and Daniel L. Schacter | Neuropsychologia | July 2, 2015

Abstract:

It has been suggested that the simulation of hypothetical episodes and the recollection of past episodes are supported by fundamentally the same set of brain regions. The present article specifies this core network via Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE). Specifically, a first meta-analysis revealed joint engagement of core network regions during episodic memory and episodic simulation. These include parts of the medial surface, the hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex within the medial temporal lobes, and the lateral temporal and inferior posterior parietal cortices on the lateral surface. Both capacities also jointly recruited additional regions such as parts of the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. All of these core regions overlapped with the default network. Moreover, it has further been suggested that episodic simulation may require a stronger engagement of some of the core network’s nodes as wells as the recruitment of additional brain regions supporting control functions. A second ALE meta-analysis indeed identified such regions that were consistently more strongly engaged during episodic simulation than episodic memory. These comprised the core-network clusters located in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior inferior parietal lobe and other structures distributed broadly across the default and fronto-parietal control networks. Together, the analyses determine the set of brain regions that allow us to experience past and hypothetical episodes, thus providing an important foundation for studying the regions’ specialized contributions and interactions.

Read full article here.

By Alexandra Touroutoglou, Joseph M. Andreano, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Bradford C. Dickerson | Hippocampus | June 24, 2015

Abstract:

Despite a growing number of studies showing relationships between behavior and resting-state functional MRI measures of large-scale brain network connectivity, no study to our knowledge has sought to investigate whether intrinsic connectivity-behavioral relationships are stable over time. In this study, we investigated the stability of such brain-behavior relationships at two timepoints, approximately 1 week apart. We focused on the relationship between the strength of hippocampal connectivity to posterior cingulate cortex and episodic memory performance. Our results showed that this relationship is stable across samples of a different age and reliable over two points in time. These findings provide the first evidence that the relationship between large-scale intrinsic network connectivity and episodic memory performance is a stable characteristic that varies between individuals.

Read full article here.

By Charlotte Silver | Vice | April 1, 2015

In June 1998, an Orange County, California, bank was robbed. Three men made off with a little over a thousand dollars in cash.

At the time, Guy Miles, a 31-year-old black man from nearby Carson, was in violation of parole. Released from a California prison the year before—after spending two years there for stealing cars from a valet service—he was not permitted to leave the state. Miles wanted to break away from the life of gangs, crime, and prison that he had been locked into since dropping out of high school, according to his family.

So he left for Las Vegas, moved in with his new girlfriend, and kept himself afloat by shuttling between small jobs. Miles concealed his whereabouts from his parole officer by telling him he was staying with his parents in Carson, and every so often he would make a dash through the desert to show up for meetings.

In September 1998, Miles’s parole officer asked him to come in for an impromptu meeting. Waiting for him at the office was a police officer with a warrant for his arrest. Two witnesses who’d been working at the Orange County bank at the time of the robbery had fingered Miles. At trial, his Vegas alibi didn’t hold up against prosecutors’ eyewitness testimonies and Miles and another man, Bernard Teamer, were found guilty. (Teamer had allegedly manned the getaway car.) Continue reading »