Author: Anne Yilmaz

Response bias modulates the confidence-accuracy relationship for both positive identifications and lineup rejections in a simultaneous lineup task

Psychology, UC San Diego, Wixted Lab

A paper of mine was just published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. This paper investigates why the confidence-accuracy relationship (CAC) for lineup rejections is often flat (while the relationship between confidence and accuracy for postiveIDs is much stronger). Specifically, this paper looks at the role of response bias in terms of restricting the range of memory signal strengths associated with a particular decision. Range restriction for particular decision may lower the ability to detect a possible relationship given a particular level of confidence due to a reduction in sensitivity.

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What latent decision variable underlies confidence in police lineup rejections?

Psychology, UC San Diego, Wixted Lab

 A new paper of mine came out in Journal of Memory and Language this past February. This is a math modeling paper looking at whether a MAX or AVG decision rule is being used as the basis for confidence when rejecting a lineup. The decision rule for posIDs, by comparison, is a MAX rule.

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Cognitive Foundations: Memory in Context

Psychology, Resources, Teaching & Talks, UC San Diego

Cognitive Foundations is an open-source, collaborative textbook edited by Dr. Celeste Pilegard. Last fall, she brought me onto her team as a subject matter expert in order to revamp “Chapter 6: Memory in Context” in preparation for the release of the second edition of the textbook. I did a lot of revising of the current material (nearly all of it overlapped with the material I taught in my PSYC 144 Memory & Amnesia course) and did a good amount of original writing as well.

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Preprint: The Scientific Principles of Memory vs. The Federal Rules of Evidence

Psychology, UC San Diego, Wixted Lab

We released a preprint of our paper, “The Scientific Principles of Memory versus the Federal Rules of Evidence,” on Open Science Framework. The manuscript was submitted for publication about a week ago.

Preprints, although citable, have neither been accepted/denied for publication nor have they undergone the peer-review process. It is expected that published manuscripts will differ from the original preprint—sometimes even in major ways (although that is never the hope). We decided to make our submitted manuscript available in this modality due to the expressed interest from those outside of our field.

This paper explains how memory contaminates, when memory is reliable, and how the current interpretation of the Federal Rules of Evidence (as it relates to eyewitness identification) may actually exacerbate the problem of irreparably contaminated evidence being used in the courtroom.

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GSPA Travel Grant Award

Psychology, UC San Diego, Wixted Lab

The UC San Diego Graduate & Professional Student Association granted me a $300 award for travel to the annual conference for the Association of Psychological Science in May. At this conference, I’ll be presenting on how response bias — not to be confused with suggestibility — is likely responsible for the flat confidence-accuracy relationship that is typically exhibited for lineup rejections. More information on this presentation can be found on this previous post.

National Eye Institute Early Career Scientist Travel Grant

Psychology, UC San Diego

The Vision Sciences Society (VSS) and National Eye Institute (NEI) awarded me their $1,000 NEI Early Career Scientist Travel Grant for the upcoming VSS conference in May in St. Pete Beach, FL.

Undergraduate, doctoral, and post-doctoral researchers who are first-author presenters on a conference abstract were eligible for the award. A subcommittee of the VSS Board of Directors determined winners based on the scientific quality of the submitted presentation and by other criteria set by the National Institutes of Health.

I will be presenting a modeling paper that addresses the underlying decision variable that the brain uses when rejecting a set of familiar objects (e.g., in this case, faces). My latest post on the VSS conference talks about my poster session more in depth.

Future Associate-In Position and SGTS Program Acceptance

Psychology, Teaching & Talks, UC San Diego

My department nomination for the Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars (SGTS) Program was accepted, which means that I’m going to be taking on another Associate-In position this summer! The course I’ll be teaching during UCSD’s summer session II is PSYC 162 Psychology & Law. PSYC 162 is an upper-division undergraduate course that closely aligns with my research interests, and I’m choosing to teach it over Zoom in order to gain further experience teaching in different environments.

The SGTS program allows for advanced doctoral students to receive formal pedagogical training (we have to take two course on pedagogy) as well as close, faculty-mentored teaching.

Dr. John Wixted will be my faculty mentor supervising my teaching and giving me feedback. I will also have members of the Engaged Teaching Hub at the Teaching + Learning Commons observe my classes in order to give input on the course design (e.g., syllabus, learning outcomes, class structure, etc.) as well as the learning and assessment tools that will be most effective for this lecture-based course. I have already taught in person at the undergraduate level, but I have never taught a full undergraduate course on Zoom. It will be incredibly beneficial to get formal, empirically-tested input on what strategies are most effective for in-person learning versus virtual learning, and I am eager to find out how to make virtual learning environments more engaging and dynamic.

Thank you everyone in the Department of Psychology for their support via their nomination letters, as well as to those at the Teaching + Learning Commons who deemed me a good candidate for their program.

APS & VSS: Upcoming Conference Poster Presentations

Psychology, UC San Diego, Wixted Lab

Today I received word from both the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) that my abstracts were accepted at their annual conventions. Both of these presentations are part of my dissertation work that addresses the often-flat confidence-accuracy relationship found in police lineup rejections. Below is a description of each poster and information on the talks themselves.

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Presentation: Navy JAG Corps

Psychology, UC San Diego, Wixted Lab

Thank you to the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps of the United States Navy for having me talk to their defense counsel teams in San Diego, CA and Bremerton, WA today for one of their weekly training days! In my talk, I discussed recall and recognition memory processes, why that distinction matters in the eyewitness domain, and then we talked about how eyewitness IDs are handled (and mishandled) by the criminal justice system. I conceptualize this (mis)handling as being due to the legal system’s lack of understanding on how memory contamination occurs in recognition memory. In my talk, I mentioned the latest consensus paper published in 2021, and introduced some topics that I’ll be discussing in my upcoming paper entitled “The Principles of Memory versus the Federal Rules of Evidence.” (It’s a working title.)

As always, speaking to attorneys about the latest research is always fun for me. I am thankful for this opportunity!