Hayley Cullen

There's credits.

It goes dark.

You've got this very clear mental representation of how that event will unfold.

We have those with crimes as well.

And with kidnapping, I think if we get the audience to think about it, when they hear kidnapping, they probably think,

Stranger comes up to child, child makes a fuss, kicks and screams, kidnapper pulls them into their van, drives off.

But that mental representation we have might be very different to how kidnapping actually occurs.

So kidnappings sometimes happen where a child willingly goes with a stranger without obvious fuss.

And that means that it could be the type of event that when it's happening, we don't realize that it's actually a crime in that instance.

That could impact the way that we remember it because of that initial perception is not that it's a crime, but it could just be an ordinary day-to-day event.

Yeah, so this was way back when I was an honours student, so when I was doing my research, my first research project as a psychology student.

And it was driven by, it was actually inspired by the William Tyrrell case where, you know,

From the reports, we know that William Tyrrell was in a Spider-Man costume, and so he should have been someone who really stood out on the day he went missing.

But nobody has been able to give information about his whereabouts on that day.

Maybe it's because if William was abducted or kidnapped, maybe it just came across like an ordinary event.

So we ran this study where we had, again, participants, they didn't know what the study was about.

They saw a video of a bus stop where a little girl arrives by car at the bus stop.

She goes and sits down and eventually an older woman comes up to her, has a conversation with her.

And in some of the video versions, we change the ending.

In another version, the lady offers the little girl a chocolate bar and they leave holding hands.