Hayley Cullen

If anything, it seems to be more contextual things that will affect whether someone notices a crime or not.

So things like how absorbed are they in the task that they're doing?

How hard is the task that they're doing?

Because our attention is a very finite resource.

So if we're devoting a lot of attention to a task,

we've got less capacity for noticing something unexpected that doesn't fit with the task that we're doing.

So the harder the task, the more likely we are to fail to notice something.

Things like alcohol intoxication, you know, high levels of alcohol intoxication could make someone less likely to notice something like a crime.

But it seems to be more these situational factors.

If they do give testimony, what our research shows in our lab, but what others are finding as well, is that they might not be believed because this intuition around...

we see unexpected and dangerous things is so strong that if someone claims that they didn't see it, they might not be believed.

In Kenny Conley's case, what happened was that when he went to trial and made claims that he didn't notice this assault, he was actually convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice.

partially on the basis that people just didn't believe that his claim could be true.

And he spent close to three years in prison before he was exonerated.

So yeah, it was quite serious implications for him just based on this claim that he didn't see the crime.

So it's actually a very productive feature of our visual system to be able to focus on a particular task that we're doing and ignore a relevant distraction.

So for the most part, when we experience this, it could be, you know, we're completing homework and we don't hear someone calling our name or, you know, waving frantically in front of us.

that's actually productive to be able to stay focused in that way.

It's when the thing that we fail to see is really consequential, like a crime, or when we're driving, if we don't see a particular hazard we're not expecting, that it's in those very rare circumstances where it can have really serious consequences.

Cheryl Grimmer's story is a really unfortunate one.