Weapon Focus

Weapon focus is the tendency of a witness to a crime to concentrate attention on a weapon at the scene, at the cost of an impaired ability to accurately remember other details of the event, and it is recognized as a factor that undermines the reliability of eyewitness testimony. When a perpetrator is holding a weapon, a witness's attention is drawn toward it, leaving less attentional capacity available for encoding other features of the scene such as the perpetrator's face, clothing or vehicle. Researchers including Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues Yuille and Burns have conducted studies supporting the existence of the effect, generally finding that witnesses pay disproportionate attention to a visible weapon in ways that measurably harm their recognition and recall of everything else present at the scene.