The Continuity of Cognition

The usefulness of the "Forensic View," from law enforcement to the paranormal.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.

Key points

• Investigative psychology involves detailed analysis and the integration of those details in context.
• This "Forensic View" is useful in criminal justice, but extends to psychology outside that realm as well.
• The continuity of the human nervous system allows us to apply this viewpoint in many important contexts.

The Forensic View is largely concerned with the psychology of issues in law enforcement and criminal investigation. There are many perceptual and cognitive factors operating in this realm. Eyewitness mistakes, for example, can derive from the tendency of human memory to become reconfigured with time, resulting in inaccurate interpretations of important facts in criminal investigations; and such misinterpretations can be significantly reduced through the investigative use of analysis in aggregate, deliberate “feature-intensive” analysis of the elements of the given situation, alternating repeatedly as needed with conscious consideration of the more Gestalt patterns deriving from these features, and with iterative reanalysis of the relevant features and their interconnections from the standpoint of whatever reasonable hypotheses are developed as the investigation proceeds (Sharps, 2024).

All of this is useful in criminal investigation; but these considerations also have broad utility in the world outside the criminal justice system. One of the most important overarching findings in psychology and neuroscience over the past century is the fact that there is continuity in the nervous system, and in the mental processes that arise in that system. In other words, similar cognitive and perceptual processes may operate across many different contexts; this fact may help us enormously to understand those processes and those contexts. The same perceptual and cognitive dynamics frequently apply, with similar results, to the world of law enforcement and to other psychological realms as disparate and far-ranging as paranormal considerations, the interpretation of theory and findings in geographic exploration and formal science, and even our ideas of mental health and mental illness (Sharps, 2024).

How does this continuity operate? In many previous posts of The Forensic View, we have seen that eyewitness processes in the criminal justice system are by no means objective; eyewitness accounts are contaminated by initial perceptual and interpretive errors, and by the natural tendency of human memory to reconfigure in the directions of gist, brevity, and personal belief. The repetition of eyewitness accounts can also contribute to this reconfiguration, and a variety of social processes can result in greater investment in, and adherence to, reconfigured and hence erroneous accounts (see Sharps, 2024).

These error-generating processes are by no means confined, within the criminal justice system, to the eyewitness realm alone. The same misinterpretive and reconfigurative characteristics of the mind operate in the frequently tragic realm of officer-involved shootings. The decision to fire on a suspect is rooted in the given officer's eyewitness memory of that suspect's actions; the cognitive functions involved must frequently operate within a very brief period, perhaps less than a single second, prior to firing.

These perceptual and cognitive factors also operate in the world of EOD, Explosive Ordinance Disposal, the terribly dangerous realm of the bomb squad. Whether an explosive device, disguised or not, is recognized as a bomb is largely dependent upon the eyewitness powers of its observer, and of course on the information which that observer brings to the situation. We see such mental continuity throughout widely disparate areas of law enforcement and the criminal justice system (Sharps, 2024).

Yet we also find the same error-generating perceptual and cognitive processes operating well outside the world of law enforcement. We might expect these dynamics to operate in the realm of “paranormal” sightings and interpretations, and they do; the planet Venus is frequently mistaken for some sort of alien spacecraft, and a whole variety of animals, unusual waves in the water, and the occasional oddly-shaped tree have repeatedly contributed to erroneous reports of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and their many cryptozoological cronies.

We might, however, be less inclined to expect these types of mistakes in serious science and exploration; but the same mental dynamics are there anyway. Christopher Columbus observed mermaids in his exploration of the Caribbean. What he actually saw were manatees; but without prior acquaintance with these marine mammals, his eyewitness powers resulted in his account of the literal embodiment of a seaman’s legend, although he did at least note that the “mermaids” were less attractive than he would have expected.

The discovery of a single mammoth tusk in the early European exploration of the American Southwest gave rise to tales of a large and bizarre creature with a single tooth so long that it had to lie down to eat. The relevant eyewitnesses certainly perceived a very large tooth; but their reconfigurative and reinterpretive processing of this artifact, at a time when nobody knew what a mammoth was (and they only had one tooth anyway), led to beliefs in a completely nonexistent creature in severe need of dental attention (Sharps, 2024).

This continuity of mental process even leads to occasional havoc in the hard sciences. The eyewitness powers of the great astronomer Percival Lowell, on observing the desert planet Mars, reconfigured natural features of the planet into a system of artificial canals, which he literally believed to be maintained by intelligent Martian engineers. The canals were mathematically impossible as described; yet Lowell, as well as other mathematically competent astronomers, saw the things anyway.

In reality, despite the eyewitness observations and accounts of many early experts in astronomy, there's not a single canal to be found anywhere on the Red Planet. The canals as such were only to be found in the elastic perceptual and interpretive powers of their observers (Sharps, 2024).

The fact that we observe this level of mental continuity in realms as disparate as criminal justice, “paranormal” sightings, geographic exploration and physical science should give psychologists and psychiatrists pause; do our beliefs and orientations within the field bias our interpretation of client and patient behaviors? There is certainly evidence to this effect (e.g., Sharps, 2024).

An understanding of the profound continuity of the nervous system, and of mental processes across all these fields, indicates that the “forensic view” which is so productive for the criminal justice system, and for many other areas of scholarship, may ultimately prove to be of great utility as we apply it to research and practice in psychology as well.