Miko M. Wilford

Iowa State University | ISU · Department of Psychology

Immediately recalling a witnessed event can increase people's susceptibility to later postevent misinformation. But this retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES) effect has been shown only when the initial recall test included specific questions that reappeared on the final test. Moreover, it is unclear whether this phenomenon is affected by the cen...

There is broad consensus among researchers both that faces are processed more holistically than other objects and that this type of processing is beneficial. We predicted that holistic processing of faces also involves a cost, namely, a diminished ability to localize change. This study (N = 150) utilized a modified change-blindness paradigm in whic...

The present study explored the effects of lecture fluency on students' metacognitive awareness and regulation. Participants watched one of two short videos of an instructor explaining a scientific concept. In the fluent video, the instructor stood upright, maintained eye contact, and spoke fluidly without notes. In the disfluent video, the instruct...

(1) Youth are particularly vulnerable to making suboptimal legal decisions due to added challenges in comprehension, as well as their ongoing neurological development. (2) This fact is especially problematic in our system of pleas, which frequently expects defendants to determine the outcome of their own cases (by accepting or rejecting plea offers...

In most U.S. jurisdictions, prosecutors are not required to clearly establish a reasonable basis for guilt prior to offering defendants plea deals. We apply Bayesian analyses, which are uniquely suited to illuminate the impact of prior probability of guilt on the informativeness of a particular outcome (i.e., a guilty plea), to demonstrate the risk...

Objectives This study examines how confession (versus eyewitness) evidence and guilt status impacts mock defendants’ plea decisions and perceptions of their probability of conviction (PoC) and the strength of evidence (SoE), key elements of the shadow-of-the-trial model. Methods In a simulated mock-theft scenario, adult participants (n = 239) were...

In two studies, we examined the impact of defense attorney recommendation on defendant plea decision-making. Community members and college students participated in a 2 (guilt status: innocent or guilty) × 2 (defense attorney recommendation: accept or reject offer) between-subjects factorial design study. The plea scenario was conveyed via an intera...

Research has established six “canonical” factors underlying wrongful convictions including: mistaken witness identification (MWID), false confession (FC), perjury or false accusation (P/FA), false or misleading forensic evidence (F/MFE), official misconduct (OM), and inadequate legal defense (ILD). While we know these factors do not occur in isolat...

Objectives Although the literature suggests wrongful guilty pleas exist, less attention has been devoted to the false guilty pleas to probation sentences. We examined the plea decision-making process when participants faced probation. Methods We conducted a 2 (guilt status: innocent or guilty) × 2 (probation length: 1 year or 5 years) × 2 (probati...

America’s founding fathers believed jury trials to be a critical component of an orderly democracy. Yet, fewer than 5% of America’s cases are decided by juries. We present an interdisciplinary review of empirical, legal, and historical literatures to highlight the significance of the disappearing trial. Without juries, direct participation in the j...

Objective: More than 95% of criminal convictions in the United States are secured by guilty pleas. Our current understanding of the “deals” that lead so many to plead guilty is often tied to the shadow-of-the-trial (SoT) model, which posits that plea outcomes rely solely on the penalty discrepancy they offer (represented as: [trial conviction proba...

Over 95% of criminal convictions in the United States are the result of guilty pleas. Consequently, it is critical that we ensure the process of pleading guilty is as free of coercion as possible. Yet, research has indicated that incarcerating defendants to await trial could have an undue influence on their decision to plead guilty. The current res...

Interpolated testing can reduce mind-wandering and proactive interference, and improve note-taking. However, recent research using face-name-profession triads, has also shown that interpolated testing can impair new learning (Davis, Chan, & Wilford, 2017). In the current study, we further examined the impact of switching from testing to new learnin...

Despite the prevalence of guilty pleas, we know relatively little about factors that influence the decision to plead. Replicating and extending Dervan and Edkins’ Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 103, 1-48. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2071397, (2013), we conducted two experiments to examine the effects of guilt status, trial penalty, and c...

The way in which information is presented can influence students’ judgments of learning (JOLs). Carpenter, Wilford, Kornell, and Mullaney (2013), found that students reported higher JOLs after viewing a fluent lecturer (good speaker) versus a disfluent lecturer, whereas actual learning performance was unaffected by lecturer fluency. The current res...

We examined how giving eyewitnesses a weak recognition experience impacts their identification decisions. In 2 experiments we forced a weak recognition experience for lineups by impairing either encoding or retrieval conditions. In Experiment 1 (n = 245), undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to watch either a clear or a degraded culpri...

The year 2016 produced a record number of exoneration cases involving guilty pleas (National Registry of Exonerations, 2017). Nonetheless, guilty pleas account for a minority of overall exonerations in the National Registry. This chapter provides a broad overview of false guilty pleas, including what they are and why they can be so difficult to doc...

Defendants facing felony prosecutions often avoid trial by pleading guilty. Sexual offense cases reach plea dispositions less frequently, though pleas are still common. Public opinion has held that sex offenders are treated too leniently by the justice system. However, limited research on sex offender pleas has not supported these perceptions. The...

Guilty pleas have received little research attention relative to other areas of psycho-legal study. In an effort to remedy this scarcity we designed a computer simulation of a plea-bargaining scenario: it was designed to be more ecologically valid than a vignette, but less resource-demanding than a high-stakes deception study. The results indicate...

The United States convicts over 1 million people of felonies each year without affording the resources of a trial. Instead, these convictions are attained by guilty plea. The current research investigated the similarities and differences that would emerge between pleas and confessions when relying on a paradigm originally developed for confession r...

Introduces this special section of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law on the topic of guilty pleas. In this special section the editors have assembled six rigorous research and analytical papers that deepen the understanding of guilty pleas and introduce a number of important policy implications. Together, these studies examined the impact of multi...

General Audience Summary New learning must be scaffolded onto previously learned concepts, and some research has shown that recalling previously learned information (i.e., retrieval practice) can aid later learning of new concepts. However, other research has found the opposite effect. Here, we examined when and why retrieval practice can enhance o...

The adjudication of crime by guilty plea has been on the rise globally for at least the last 30 years. Few countries, however, have accepted pleas to the degree of the United States, whose highest court recently acknowledged a criminal justice system near-synonymous with a "system of pleas, not a system of trials" (Lafler v. Cooper, 2012, p. 3). Th...

Suspects accused of involvement in the same crime can be tried in one multiple-defendant trial. While research has long demonstrated the difficulties of being a juror, no published work has examined whether multiple-defendant trials compound these difficulties. The current research recruited both student and community samples to determine whether t...

Taking an immediate recall test prior to misinformation exposure can increase eyewitness suggestibility-a finding termed retrieval-enhanced suggestibility. Here, we examined whether retrieval-enhanced suggestibility would occur when participants were administered an immediate Cognitive Interview (CI). The CI is an investigative interviewing techniq...

Taking an intervening test between learning episodes can enhance later source recollec- tion. Paradoxically, testing can also increase people’s susceptibility to the misinformation effect – a finding termed retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES, Chan, Thomas, & Bulevich, 2009). We conducted three experiments to examine this apparent contradiction....