Eyewitness testimony is a common part of police procedural television shows and movies.

Think of Law and Order, when eyewitnesses take the stand to say they saw the accused perpetrator commit the crime.

However, according to weapon-focus research, real-life eyewitness accounts are often inaccurate.

Weapon-focus research is the study of eyewitness memory and the ability to recall details such as facial features when threatened with a weapon.

Most of the findings suggest people tend to remember the weapon and not the person holding it.

Dr. Jonathan Fawcett, a professor in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at Memorial, leads a multinational team of experts who research the phenomenon.

By using virtual reality (VR), Dr. Fawcett and his research team aim to understand why the presence of a weapon impairs memory.

The project, co-led by Dr. Fawcett, Dr. Christopher Lively, a professor of applied forensic psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, and Dr. Oscar Meruvia-Pastor, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Memorial, received a $74,792 Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to conduct the study.

The effect of surprise

“If you were to ask someone in the field, like a police officer, they would probably say people tend to focus on the weapon because it’s threatening,” said Dr. Fawcett. “However, there is evidence that this is simply because the weapon is surprising. You don’t often see guns in corner stores, so when one is drawn, it takes your brain some time to work out what’s going on.”

According to Dr. Fawcett, the extra processing load reduces the capacity to remember things like a perpetrator’s face. 

Knowing that practitioners and researchers disagree on the cause of the weapon-focus effect, he decided to dig deeper into how scientists study it.

Testing focus

Most researchers use pictures or slideshows to test weapon focus, and because of the absence of a real threat, they rarely find evidence that threat plays an important role. 

“We reasoned that earlier research may have underestimated the role of threat because research tends to use materials that are so unrealistic that they couldn’t possibly be threatening,” said Dr. Fawcett.

The team endeavoured to develop a more realistic way to study the effect, using VR to create a scenario that is safe and controlled but realistic and involved enough that participants might feel threatened.

Dr. Meruvia-Pastor says VR offers greater immersion and a sense of presence during a simulated crime.

“We believe it offers a new platform to obtain insights into eyewitness memory in a way that better aligns with the real-life experience of witnesses,” he said. 

The final version of the virtual simulation is almost complete, and by fall 2026, the study will be run at multiple sites at Memorial University, St. Francis Xavier University and other sites across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.

Student-driven research

The project has been student-driven since its inception.

Student Soheil Moghaddam first developed the VR scenario; Parsa Durali then refined it. Both contributed to the project as master’s students in the Department of Computer Science.

More recently, Mikayla Tat has taken over data collection as part of her master’s thesis in experimental psychology, with help from incoming undergraduate honours student Chloe Reid.

Ms. Tat says she’s already learned a lot about eyewitness memory.

“People don’t realize how hard it is to study memory for complex events in the laboratory,” she said. “It’s also given me a deeper appreciation for how much work goes into psychological research.” 

Ms. Reid agrees.

“This is a super exciting step to take in eyewitness research, and I cannot wait to work on the project next year.”

Dr. Fawcett says the students “have been excellent” and “a true testament” to the Psychology and Computer Science departments’ undergraduate and graduate programs at both Memorial University and St. Xavier University.

“Together, we encapsulate the interdisciplinary, multi-institutional and multigenerational nature of this collaboration.”

Moving forward

For now, the research team, which also includes Department of Psychology professors Drs. Brent Snook and Laura Fallon, is focusing on creating the most realistic crime simulation they can.

Concurrent with the study, the team is interviewing participants who took part in the research as well as individuals who have experienced violent crime to better understand how their experiences differ.

For his part, Dr. Lively says that despite decades of work examining the weapon-focus effect, the literature suggests a lack of consultation with people having experienced weapon-related crime, including victims, witnesses or police officers.

“Interviewing these groups and getting a better understanding of their lived experience not only fills a gap in the literature but also strengthens community-academic-practitioner partnerships,” he said.

The next step is to expand the VR crime simulation to answer additional, unresolved questions.

“The weapon-focus effect is one of many great examples of the difficulties involved in studying complex, real-world phenomena in a laboratory setting,” said Dr. Fawcett. 

He hopes to develop a “living meta-analysis,” or a summary of current findings curated by a multinational panel of content experts, led by himself and Dr. Lively to answer the question: Is how researchers study eyewitness memory in the laboratory anything like how folks experience weapon crime in the real world?

Hint: they think it isn’t.