Hayley Cullen

And it's what we would consider an ambiguous kidnapping.

It doesn't show the typical signs of struggle.

And if you see it, you might not interpret it as a crime.

Where the lady gets up, she pulls the girl's arm and drags her, and the little girl calls out for help.

And I should say our participants have headphones on, so they think they're listening to their music, they're waiting for their bus to arrive.

So in that unambiguous kidnapping version, they can actually hear the girl screaming over the audio.

And what we did was we asked our participants whether they noticed anything strange about the video that they saw so that we could get a sense of what their interpretation of the event was.

Interestingly, what we found when we first ran this study was that about half of the participants

who were shown the video with the unambiguous crime, the screaming and dragging, did not interpret it as a crime.

They said, didn't think I saw anything like a crime.

The reason for that, though, was while participants were watching this video, we told them that they needed to be

counting the number of buses that pass the bus stop.

So like I said before, their attention was kind of being taken away from what was actually happening in the video with the lady and the girl.

So what it suggested to us is that when people are distracted or focusing on their day-to-day tasks, even things that are seemingly obvious might not be interpreted as crimes, like abduction or kidnapping.

A lot of researchers, even eyewitness researchers, I think just made the assumption that we notice crimes and so in our experiments we don't have to worry about disguising what we're researching.

We can just ask people to watch our crime video and tell us what they remember.

But...

I think it just goes to show that at least some of the research, we might actually be overestimating what people remember because we're making assumptions about what they saw when my research is showing that we might miss things about a crime and we might not interpret things to be crimes in the first place.

If we can better understand eyewitness memory, we can reduce instances of wrongful convictions, which I think benefits society at large.

It benefits witnesses who might feel guilty about making a mistake in identification.