Visual evidence

Abstract

Visual and other demonstrative evidence has become increasingly prevalent in American and other courtrooms in recent years. However, there have been relatively few experimental studies of the effects of this kind of evidence in legal settings. As a consequence, little is known about when and how it affects legal decision making. In this article, I survey the extant research, including studies of photographs, videos, computer animations, and PowerPoint displays. The research shows that visual evidence affects legal decisions in some circumstances but not in others. It also indicates that visual evidence sometimes enhances legal judgment by improving recall and understanding but sometimes impairs judgment by prompting undue emotional responses, cognitive and perceptual biases, and/or peripheral processing. The limitations of the research are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.

Full text

Visual and other demonstrative evidence, including
photographs, drawings, maps, and models, has long been
used in court to illustrate the oral testimony of eyewit-
nesses and experts (Mnookin, 1998).1 It has become in-
creasingly prevalent in recent years, in large part because
digital technology has made it easier to record or, in the
case of computer animations, to recreate legally relevant
reality visually (Feigenson & Spiesel, 2009). A dashboard
camera video, for instance, provided the dispositive evi-
dence in a recent Supreme Court decision on the police’s
authority to use deadly force to terminate a car chase
(Scott v. Harris, 2007),2 and a cell phone video will be
critical should a lawsuit brought against a New York City
police officer for assaulting a bicyclist proceed to trial
(Weichselbaum, 2009).3
Although there have been efforts to document court-
room technology generally (e.g., Center for Legal and
Court Technology, 2007) and to instruct judges and law-
yers in its use (e.g., Federal Judicial Center/National Insti-
tute for Trial Advocacy, 2001), there have been relatively
few experimental studies of the effects of visual and mul-
timedia evidence in legal settings. As a consequence, little
is known about when and how this kind of evidence affects
legal decision making. A better understanding should be
not only of intrinsic interest to cognitive psychologists but
also extremely useful to the legal system, helping policy
makers and judges to regulate the use of such evidence
more wisely and informing advocates as they decide when
and how to present it.
VARIETIES OF VISUAL EVIDENCE
There are good reasons to suspect that visual evidence
may influence ultimate judgments of guilt or liability and
damages. The police officers who beat Rodney King might
never have been brought to trial were it not for George
Holliday’s videotape of the incident, and the jurors’ ver-
dict arguably turned on their interpretations of the tape.
As surveillance videos made by both governments and
private citizens proliferate, such evidence is likely to make
a difference in more and more cases (see Feigenson &
Spiesel, 2009). Even where it is not necessarily the focal
point of the case, visual evidence would likely influence
decision makers’ thoughts and feelings and, hence, their
verdicts. Because still or moving pictures can be more
vivid than oral testimony or text, for instance, visual evi-
dence could well be more memorable and/or lead to stron-
ger emotional responses (see Bell & Loftus, 1985), either
of which could affect the outcome. Personal injury law-
yers often present day-in-the-life movies of an accident
or malpractice victim (e.g., Joseph, 1997), presumably
because they believe that the movies give jurors a better
understanding of the extent of the victim’s injuries and/
or encourage them to sympathize with the victim, lead-
ing to larger damage awards. In short, general cognitive
psychological research, the practices of experienced trial
lawyers, and perhaps common sense all suggest that visual
evidence may often affect legal outcomes.
Experimental Findings
The experimental findings to date, however, are mixed.
Photographs
. Photographic evidence has generally
yielded more robust effects than have other media on
ultimate judgments. For example, showing participants
photos of the accident victim in a negligence case signifi-
cantly increased damage awards but not measures of the
defendant’s culpability (Oliver & Griffitt, 1976; Whalen
& Blanchard, 1982). More recently, showing participants
either color or black-and-white explicit autopsy photos
(Douglas, Lyon, & Ogloff, 1997) or either neutral or grue-
149 © 2010 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
Visual evidence
NEAL FEIGENSON
Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut
Visual and other demonstrative evidence has become increasingly prevalent in American and other court-
rooms in recent years. However, there have been relatively few experimental studies of the effects of this kind of
evidence in legal settings. As a consequence, little is known about when and how it affects legal decision mak-
ing. In this article, I survey the extant research, including studies of photographs, videos, computer animations,
and PowerPoint displays. The research shows that visual evidence affects legal decisions in some circumstances
but not in others. It also indicates that visual evidence sometimes enhances legal judgment by improving recall
and understanding but sometimes impairs judgment by prompting undue emotional responses, cognitive and
perceptual biases, and/or peripheral processing. The limitations of the research are discussed, and directions for
future research are suggested.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
2010, 17 (2), 149-154
doi:10.3758/PBR.17.2.149
N. Feigenson, neal.feigenson@quinnipiac.edu

150 FEIGENSON
Computer animations
. Computer animations or sim-
ulations recreating litigated events (e.g., plane crashes,
vehicular collisions, slip-and-falls) seem to have been of
particular concern to judges and legal scholars, perhaps
because they were among the first forms of computer-
generated visual evidence to be introduced or perhaps be-
cause their potential for misleading viewers seems more
obvious than that of photographs or videos. Of the several
experimental studies of computer animations, some have
shown effects on judgments of liability or responsibil-
ity (M. A. Dunn, Salovey, & Feigenson, 2006, Study 1;
Houston, Joiner, Uddo, Harper, & Stroll, 1995; Kassin
& Dunn, 1997) or damage awards (M. A. Dunn et al.,
2006, Study 1), whereas others have not (Bennett, Leib-
man, & Fetter, 1999; Dahir, 2005; M. A. Dunn et al., 2006,
Study 2; Ray, 2001; Rosado, 1998).
PowerPoint
. Two unpublished studies of the effects of
PowerPoint on legal decision making have yielded simi-
larly mixed results. In one, the plaintiffs’ use of Power-
Point slides featuring graphs illustrating statistical evi-
dence increased the defendant’s judged responsibility in
a civil case (Park & Feigenson, 2009); in the other, text
slides summarizing expert testimony had no effect on
judgments of guilt (Binder, 2006).
Limitations of the Research
Why has the research to date not provided stronger
support for the intuitive hypothesis that visual evidence
should affect ultimate legal judgments? Part of the ex-
planation is simply that there are so few studies. Given
the vagaries of experimental research, it may be prema-
ture to expect clear patterns to emerge, and any infer-
ences from even less equivocal findings to broad claims
about real-world effects would have to be tentative. The
methodological limitations of various studies may also
be partly responsible (for a review of methodological is-
sues in computer animation studies, e.g., see Dahir, 2005).
For instance, where visual evidence was expected to affect
outcomes by increasing recall and understanding of key
information, the case materials may have been so simple
that participants could comprehend them well enough
without visual aids, so that the demonstratives made no
difference. In some, the visuals may not have been of suf-
ficiently high quality to influence participants’ thinking or
may even have elicited responses contrary to those that the
researchers had intended.
It is also worth emphasizing that the most important fac-
tor in juror decision making is the strength of the evidence
(Eisenberg & Wells, 2002; Visher, 1987). Consequently,
significant effects on dichotomous outcome variables
(guilt/innocence, liability/no liability) should be expected
only when the other evidence is closely balanced, which it
was sometimes not (e.g., Kassin & Garfield, 1991).
Finally, the mixed results may indicate the presence of
moderating factors. That more consistent effects have been
obtained for crime scene or autopsy photos on judgments
of guilt than for, say, computer animations on judgments
of liability may reflect the importance of media type (i.e.,
photorealistic pictures as opposed to comparatively ab-
some photos of a murder victim (Bright & Goodman-
Delahunty, 2006) significantly increased the proportion
of guilty verdicts. In another, unpublished study, par-
ticipants who saw gruesome photos of a traffic accident
victim were significantly likelier to find the defendant
driver liable (Bright & Goodman-Delahunty, 2009). On
the other hand, two dissertation studies failed to show any
effects of murder victim photographs on participants’ ver-
dict preferences or sentencing decisions (Modin, 2006;
Nemeth, 2002).
Videos
. Two studies in which the presence or absence
of video evidence was manipulated as an independent
variable—in one, a crime scene walk-through was used
(Kassin & Garfield, 1991); in the other, a video re-
enactment of an accident was used (Fishfader, Howells,
Katz, & Teresi, 1996)—failed to show any effects on par-
ticipants’ verdicts, on one hand, or on the percentage of
liability that they attributed to the plaintiff or their damage
awards, on the other.
There are no experimental studies of the effects of sur-
veillance or day-in-the-life videos on legal judgments in
which video and no-video conditions have been compared,
but correlations have been found between participants’
interpretations of surveillance videos and their attitudes
and/or demographic characteristics. For instance, mock
jurors who supported the death penalty were more likely
than those who opposed it to infer from an ambiguous
surveillance videotape of a convenience store killing that
the defendant intended to murder the victim (Goodman-
Delahunty, Greene, & Hsiao, 1998). And an analysis of
survey responses to an edited version of the dashboard
camera videotape at issue in Scott v. Harris (2007) showed
that black and politically liberal respondents were signifi-
cantly more likely than whites and conservatives to dis-
agree with the Supreme Court and find that the driver was
not posing enough of a threat to public safety to justify
the police’s use of deadly force (Kahan, Hoffman, & Bra-
man, 2009).
Videotaped testimony
. The effects of videotaped
testimony, remote live testimony presented through vid-
eoconferencing or closed-circuit television technology,
and videotaped confessions have been addressed in more
studies. These are not “visual evidence” in the sense used
elsewhere in this article (they are not demonstrative evi-
dence but, rather, a mediated presentation of the testimony
itself), but they do constitute another way in which using
visual technologies in court may affect legal decision mak-
ing. In criminal cases, the use of videotaped or remote tes-
timony can raise the constitutional issue of a defendant’s
right to confront his accusers (e.g., Maryland v. Craig,
1990), and so the topic is of considerable interest to both
legal scholars and psychologists. In several early studies,
it was found that presenting testimony on videotape, as
opposed to live, did not affect mock jurors’ verdict prefer-
ences (or their ability to detect deception on the part of
witnesses, another topic of special concern to researchers
and legal scholars; for a review, see Hartmus, 1996). More
recent research has largely confirmed these basic findings
(e.g., Goodman et al., 1998).

VISUAL EVIDENCE 151
thus to understand key events. This may help explain why
animations tend to affect liability and/or damage judg-
ments only in cases in which the disputed factual issue is
relatively unfamiliar—for example, a plane crash (Hous-
ton et al., 1995), the effects of a plane crash on the housing
of a communication device inside the plane (M. A. Dunn
et al., 2006, Study 1), or the effects of a vehicular colli-
sion on the shoulder harness of a child safety seat (Ro-
sado, 1998). When confronting more familiar scenarios,
jurors think that they can visualize events well enough on
the basis of the other evidence (e.g., a car crash; Bennett
et al., 1999; M. A. Dunn et al., 2006, Study 2; Ray, 2001,
Study 1), so the animation does not make a difference.
Visualization, however, has not yet been shown to mediate
the effect of animations on ultimate judgments in unfamil-
iar scenarios (M. A. Dunn et al., 2006, Study 1), nor has fa-
miliarity yet been directly manipulated as an independent
variable. In one other study, it was found that multimedia
(video, animation, and text) improved understanding of
scientific evidence only for those with a visual learning
preference (Hewson & Goodman-Delahunty, 2008). In
summary, the research to date has shown relatively few
beneficial effects.
Detrimental Effects
Visual evidence would also be predicted to have detri-
mental effects on legal judgment. For example, it might
decrease judgmental accuracy by inviting jurors to decide
on the basis of peripheral cues rather than the content of
the message (elaboration likelihood model of persuasion;
Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Jurors might infer from the law-
yer’s use of a visual display, for instance, that the lawyer
is especially likeable or well prepared and might use that
inference as a heuristic for the strength of the argument
that the lawyer is presenting (see Petty & Wegener, 1999).
Particular kinds of demonstrative evidence may function
as issue-specific peripheral cues. For example, illustrat-
ing an article about cognitive neuroscience research with
brain images was shown to lead participants to rate the
article as better reasoned than when the article was ac-
companied by a bar graph or no illustration (McCabe &
Castel, 2008). At the same time, jurors may use visual
displays in ways that could bias their processing of the
message’s content. For example, decision makers may be
more inclined to think that trial information presented vi-
sually is truthful just because they can process it more eas-
ily than they can the same information presented in verbal
form (Winkielman, Schwarz, Reber, & Fazendeiro, 2003).
Perhaps most important, visual displays may be especially
powerful elicitors of emotionally charged mental imagery
(Kosslyn, 1994) that can bias ultimate judgments.
Experimental Findings
In a number of studies, it has been found that visual
evidence may affect decision making by eliciting undue
emotional responses, cognitive or perceptual biases, or
reliance on peripheral cues.
Emotional impact
. When mock jurors in a criminal
case study saw gruesome autopsy or crime scene pho-
stract animations). Another possible moderator, identified
in some computer animation studies, is the familiarity of
the case scenario: Animations tend to affect judgments
only when the subject matter is generally unfamiliar to
participants (see, e.g., M. A. Dunn et al., 2006). A further
pattern that may be emerging is that visual evidence seems
likeliest to affect ultimate judgments when only one side
uses that evidence (M. A. Dunn et al., 2006, Study 1; Park
& Feigenson, 2009).
EFFECTS OF VISUAL EVIDENCE
ON JUDGMENT PROCESSES
To refine these speculations regarding potential mod-
erators of visual evidence effects, we need to explore the
mental processes through which visual displays may af-
fect judgments and, hence, to examine potential mediating
effects. Lawyers and judges (and legal scholars) should
be especially interested in identifying these processes:
Because evidence may not be admitted if the trial judge
determines that its probative value is substantially out-
weighed by any risk it may pose of unfair prejudice to
the opposing party or of misleading or confusing the jury
(Federal Rules of Evidence, 2009), it is important to know
whether visual evidence exerts influence on ultimate judg-
ments (when it does) in ways that tend to enhance or im-
pair decision making.
Beneficial Effects
General psychological research suggests that visual
evidence would sometimes improve legal judgment. For
instance, visual displays can (as was noted above) enhance
jurors’ attention and recall (Bell & Loftus, 1985), which
would be predicted to improve their ultimate judgments.
Visuals can also increase jurors’ level of engagement,
motivating them to decide more accurately (see Chaiken,
1980). Dual-coding theory (Paivio, 1971, 1986) predicts
that by appealing more directly to the visual processing
channel, visual evidence may help people whose learning
style inclines toward the visual to understand trial informa-
tion better (R. Dunn, 2000; Mayer, 2001). Charts and dia-
grams can improve viewers’ comprehension of quantitative
information; moving animations can improve their grasp
of dynamic processes, especially when accompanied by an
oral narration (Mayer & Sims, 1994), as would typically be
the case in court.
Experimental Findings
Recall
. Exposure to visual displays has sometimes
been shown to improve mock jurors’ recall of key evi-
dence (Binder, 2006, Study 2; Dahir, 2005; Morell, 1999).
Other studies, however, have shown mixed effects on recall
(Park & Feigenson, 2009) or none (Houston et al., 1995).
And in none of the studies in which improved recall was
found did the visual evidence affect ultimate judgments of
liability, so improved recall could not be a mediator.
Understanding
. Computer animations sometimes ap-
pear to enhance mock jurors’ ability to visualize (M. A.
Dunn et al., 2006, Study 1; but cf. Ray, 2001, Study 2) and

152 FEIGENSON
Other Effects
It is also worth observing that whatever the effects of
visual evidence on legal judgments, the decision mak-
ers themselves may not be aware of them (Douglas et al.,
1997; M. A. Dunn et al., 2006; Ray, 2001). This may be
unsurprising to cognitive psychologists, given people’s
well-known inability to know their own thought processes
through mere introspection (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), but it
provides a cautionary note for lawyers, who, in order to de-
termine whether it is worth creating a computer animation
for trial, may rely on asking themselves (or focus groups)
what they think the effect of the animation will be.
Limitations of the Research
It should not be inferred from these results that appro-
priately designed visual evidence is unlikely to lead to bet-
ter legal judgment. In many of the studies to date, recall,
understanding, or other related effects have simply not
been measured (e.g., Bennett et al., 1999; Kassin & Dunn,
1997), or mediational analyses have not been conducted to
determine whether any such measures of improved think-
ing played a role in participants’ ultimate judgments (e.g.,
Rosado, 1998). The fact, for instance, that animations
consistent with the physical evidence increase the percent-
age of verdicts in accordance with that evidence (Kassin
& Dunn, 1997, Study 1) strongly indicates that visual dis-
plays can improve decision making. The research just has
not yet adequately explained how that happens.
In summary, we have only fragmentary knowledge so
far about when and how visual evidence affects legal judg-
ments of guilt or liability and damages (cf. Williams &
Jones, 2005). Beyond the ecological validity concerns ap-
plicable to some of the experiments (e.g., impoverished
stimulus materials, participants unrepresentative of real
jurors, absence of deliberations), there are simply too few
studies, in which the designs are too varied and dependent
measures too inconsistent (and in which dependent vari-
ables of interest and/or mediational analyses are sometimes
omitted), to permit confident inferences about the role of
visual evidence in the processes of legal decision making.
CONCLUSION: TOWARD A MODEL OF
VISUAL EVIDENCE EFFECTS
Legal decision making involves highly complex cog-
nitive and emotional processing, and one would expect
that the impacts of visual evidence would be varying and
nuanced—that different kinds of visual displays would
have different effects, for different reasons, under differ-
ent conditions. Missing from the existing literature on vi-
sual evidence effects is a comprehensive framework that
might help make better sense of the findings to date and
suggest productive avenues for further research (cf. Fei-
genson & Dunn, 2003). Such a model should include at
least the following components:
1. Independent variables:
(a) Features of the visual evidence: medium or
format (e.g., photograph, video, animation,
tos, for instance, they became more anxious, anguished,
disturbed, and shocked (Douglas et al., 1997) or angry
(Bright & Goodman-Delahunty, 2006), and mediational
analyses showed that these negative emotions made
them more likely to vote to convict the defendant. In one
negligence case study, mock jurors’ negative emotional
responses to a video reenactment of a child’s drowning
were correlated with lesser attributions of responsibility
to the plaintiff, but it was not shown that the emotional
responses mediated those attributions (Fishfader et al.,
1996).
Cognitive and perceptual biases
. Studies of the vi-
sual hindsight bias—the “saw it all along” effect (Harley,
2007; Harley, Carlsen, & Loftus, 2004)—suggest that in
a malpractice case, for instance, jurors who see an X-ray,
knowing that the ambiguous spot on it turned out to be
the tumor that killed the victim, may be likelier to be-
lieve that the defendant radiologist, who of course did not
know when he read the X-ray that the spot indicated a
tumor, should have seen it that way too. One study involv-
ing highway accident scenarios found that mock jurors
who saw computer animations of the accidents were more
susceptible to the hindsight bias than were those who saw
diagrams of the scene accompanied by text (Roese, Fessel,
Summerville, Kruger, & Dilich, 2006).
Visual evidence has also been shown to trigger the
perceptual bias of illusory causation, people’s tendency
to overattribute causality to an especially salient stimu-
lus (Ratcliff, Lassiter, Schmidt, & Snyder, 2006). One
manifestation of this is the actor–observer effect, the
tendency to ascribe one’s own behavior to external or
situational causes while attributing the behavior of oth-
ers to internal, dispositional causes (Jones & Nisbett,
1971). The actor–observer effect has been invoked to
explain why an animation depicting a plane’s descent
and crash from the flight crew’s point of view led mock
jurors to attribute less responsibility for the crash to the
flight crew (Houston et al., 1995). In that study, however,
point of view was not manipulated, and so the effect was
not directly tested for. A more valid and robust finding
is a camera perspective bias: Mock jurors who watched
a criminal suspect’s videotaped confession in which only
the suspect appeared on screen were significantly like-
lier than those who also saw the interrogator to believe
that the confession was voluntary and that the suspect
was guilty (Lassiter, Geers, Munhall, Handley, & Beers,
2001; Ratcliff et al., 2006).
Peripheral processing
. Demonstrative evidence can
also prompt decision makers to rely on peripheral cues
such as judgments about the source of the message. Mock
jurors who watched an animation of a slip-and-fall ac-
cident found the expert witness whose testimony the ani-
mation illustrated to be more credible than did those who
saw still slides or no visuals (Dahir, 2005). Another study
showed that when the plaintiffs’ lawyer accompanied his
opening statement with PowerPoint slides, mock jurors
judged the defendant’s lawyer to be less well prepared and
less persuasive and, as a result, were inclined to hold the
defendant more responsible (Park & Feigenson, 2009).

VISUAL EVIDENCE 153
sion making. They may also provide guidance to judges
who must weigh the various beneficial and detrimental
features of visual evidence (Federal Rules of Evidence,
2009), thereby enhancing the potential of this evidence to
improve rather than impair legal judgment.
AUTHOR NOTE
I thank Bobbie Spellman for the opportunity to contribute to this
special issue; Veronica Dahir and Meghan Dunn, for their helpful com-
ments on an earlier draft of the article; Spellman and Tom Busey, for
their careful and insightful review of subsequent drafts; and Dean Brad
Saxton, for his generous research support. Correspondence concerning
this article should be addressed to N. Feigenson, Quinnipiac Univer-
sity School of Law, 275 Mount Carmel Ave., Hamden, CT 06518-1908
( e-mail: neal.feigenson@quinnipiac.edu).
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(a) Ultimate judgments (in criminal case, guilt
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(b) Confidence in judgments
(c) Ratings of importance of visual evidence to
judgments
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154 FEIGENSON
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NOTES
1. Demonstrative evidence is to be distinguished from real evidence
(actual things involved in the case; e.g., a murder weapon). Within the
class of demonstratives, courts often distinguish between illustrative
evidence (e.g., drawings or computer animations, offered merely to il-
lustrate oral testimony) and substantive visual evidence (e.g., X-rays or
brain scans). The distinction between the two is irrelevant for the pur-
poses of this article.
2. The video can be viewed online at www.supremecourtus.gov/
opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb.
3. The video can be viewed online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=
nWjSOVDyUJ4.
(Manuscript received June 23, 2009;
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