I do assure you however that the website has not been abandoned, and that this website as well as others in my ‘Blogroll’ at the bottom of the page are being added to and updated when possible. Any questions or comments please feel free to email or comment on any page, i would especially love to hear from anybody living in Melbourne, Australia (as i moved there recently) and anybody interested in forensic psychology or forensic related fields.

Why do i say their father should not have been a police officer? In addition to frequently beating his children, for real and imagined reasons, James Rolling used to capture stray cats from around the neighbourhood which he would then torture to death, enjoying their screams of pain as they suffered.

His mother was of no help having made excuses for her husband’s extremely strange and violent behaviours, while never supporting either of her sons. When Danny was 9 years old she suffered a nervous breakdown and was not a part of their lives from that point on. This bout of trouble also contributed to Danny failing the 3rd grade

In high school both children had psychological dilemmas and were described by school counsellors as having an inferiority complex and problems with anger management and poor impulse control. By the time he was in his early adolescence Danny had become a heavy drinker and at one stage was caught red handed by his father who handcuffed and arrested him. Courtesy of this he served two weeks in Shreveport’s local jail and not surprisingly upon release he ran away from home after yet another argument with dad.

This pattern of coming and going from the family home would continue for the rest of his life, more prominently during his high school years and due to this he also failed his Sophomore year before dropping out and joining the United States Air Force at the age of 17. Unfortunately for Danny Rolling though his chronic drug and alcohol abuse continued once he was in the USAF and he subsequently served time in a military prison. In 1973 he was given a premature dishonourable discharge along with being diagnosed with an unspecified personality disorder.

Back in Shreveport he was constantly drunk or stoned yet somehow found religion at a local Pentecostal church. Here he met a 19 year old girl by the name of Mather Halko and they married in September 1974. This seemed to settle Rolling down for a period of time although by the following year when they had their first child the marriage was already on the rocks and she left him in 1977.

Resuming his former life of crime Rolling began committing armed robberies and stealing cars. In August 1979 he was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in prison for robbery of a store in Columbus, Georgia and an escape attempt once incarcerated added another year to his sentence. For a reason i have not been able to establish from my research, a public defender advised Rolling to confess to another armed robbery he had committed in July 1979 in Alabama. This netted him an additional 10 year custodial sentence that he would have to serve consecutively as it was committed in a different state to the one he was currently incarcerated in. He started serving this sentence in June 1982 but was for unknown reasons paroled in 1984, only 2 years later.

Once again he returned to Shreveport to live with his father, who was now retired. However home was still a raging battleground and he hit the road again. In July 1985 he robbed a store in Clinton, Mississippi and was arrested the next day in a stolen car. For this indiscretion he was given a 15 year sentence, of which again he only served a very small amount and was paroled in July 1988 after barely 3 years on the inside. And yes, again he returned to Shreveport where he was able to obtain stable employment as an electrician’s apprentice.

By this stage though, Danny Rolling’s dreams had grown increasingly strange and violent. Then on November 6, 1989, Tom Grissom, his 24 yr old daughter Julie and his 8 yr old grandson Sean were found murdered inside their Shreveport home. All had been repeatedly stabbed with a long bladed knife but Julie was quite obviously the killer’s intended or main target. She had been slashed and mutilated, both pre and post-mortem, was covered in bite marks, had been washed down with soap in an attempt to remove any trace evidence and had been posed in a sexually explicit manner.

Investigators were at a loss as to suspects and Rolling was never even on their list. Nonetheless Danny encountered yet more trouble at home and on May 17, 1990 a violent altercation erupted over an amazingly trivial subject – should car windows be rolled up or left down when it is raining? The senior Rolling pulled out a hand gun in a misguided attempt to settle the question but Danny relinquished his father of the pistol before shooting him in the stomach and head. Fearing he had just murdered his father he fled the scene and headed for Louisiana, strangely though his father survived.

Eventually he ended up in Gainesville, Florida and on August 26, 1990 two bodies were discovered in an apartment complex. The victims were those of Sonja Larsen, 18, and Christina Powell, 17 – they had been deceased for approximately 2 days, had both been mutilated with nipples cut off one victim while the other had been sodomised.

At 1:30am the next day Christa Hoyt, an 18 year old student that was a part time employee of the local Sheriff’s office was found murdered in her home. Her naked body had been washed with liquid soap and once again posed in a sexually explicit manner. Further to this she had been decapitated and her severed head was being proudly displayed on her bookshelf, surrounded by mirrors so that the gruesome image projected out her window.

A day later again on August 28, 1990 Tracy Paules and Manual Taboada were both stabbed repeatedly to death. Tracy had been sodomised but apart from that there were no ritualistic overtones from the earlier killings. All three crime scenes had been wiped clean of fingerprints while there was also evidence of blood being removed from the scene – the motive of which was never established.

Social panic took flight as students left Gainesville in droves only 2 weeks into the semester while investigators were focusing their attention to a list of 7 suspects. The spotlight was currently on Edward Humphrey, a local 18 year old that was a diagnosed bipolar sufferer and he also had a history of admission to psychiatric facilities. Known to skip his medication at times he believed Satan was pursuing him – a sign of a paranoid delusions that some sufferers of bipolar are known to endure (the more common type is simply delusions of grandiosity). He had attempted suicide twice, was often involved in physical altercations and was fascinated with ninjas and knives.

His neighbour was a police officer who called him a ‘goddamned weirdo who’s always acting mental’ and odd behaviour seemed to worsen around the time of the murders with him threatening employees at a local bar with slitting their throats for refusing him service on August 24th (the proposed day the first two victims were murdered).

On August 30 he had a violent altercation with his grandmother and was arrested; while in custody police delved deeper into his movements at the time of the killings and could not find any hard evidence to connect him to any of the crimes. Nonetheless he was convicted of assaulting his grandmother on October 10, 1990 and was sentenced to inpatient treatment in Chattahoochee State Hospital.

Danny Rolling though, as usual, was in trouble; he continued committing burglaries and narrowly escaped capture a number of times with police suspecting he was a pusher (drug dealer). He also boasted to acquaintances that he had robbed a local bank but no evidence of this ever came to light. In an attempt to escape some of the heat around him in Gainesville he drove to Tampa in a stolen car and robbed a supermarket there on September 1, 1990. After a number of other burglaries he committed yet another robbery, this time in Ocala on September 7. Police were quick to respond and a high speed pursuit ensued with Rolling eventually crashing his getaway car and fleeing on foot, leaving his $4700 loot behind. He was eventually discovered by police on patrol in the area hiding behind a garbage dumpster and arrested.
Back in Gainesville detectives were examining records of similar murders across the USA courtesy of the ViCAP system which had been in existence since 1985 when the computer gave them the details of the Grissom triple homicide in Shreveport – it cited similar weapons, post-mortem mutilation, washing of the bodies to remove evidence, posing of the corpse and the petite brunette victims as all similar to the homicides they were investigating. Shortly after this it was discovered that Rolling, who was still in custody, was from Shreveport and in addition was wanted for the shooting assault of his father. Pubic hair and tools were then recovered from a camp site where Rolling was living and a substantial material and biological link was established between him and all the murders in Gainesville. DNA was also found to match semen found inside the sodomised victims.

Between September 25 and October 19 of 1991 detectives continued to build their murder case, while Rolling was being convicted of three burglaries and, given his lengthy criminal record, he was given an extremely long custodial sentence – a relief no doubt to detectives.

In November they finally had enough evidence to obtain an indictment on all 5 murders committed in Gainesville and rolling agreed to talk about the killings.

He immediately began to blame his urge to kill on a split personality that he called Gemini. This alter ego apparently loved to make people suffer and Gemini told each individual victim what was planned for them – mutilations, everything – while they were still alive before the ‘festivities’ began.

On February 15, 1994 jury selection finally began after long case related delays but Rolling automatically changed his plea to guilty in a vain attempt to receive some mercy in his sentencing. On April 20, 1994 he was sentenced to die in Florida’s electric chair and he was finally executed on October 25, 2006 by lethal injection due to the abolishment of the electric chair. He was pronounced dead at 6:13pm local time.

Firstly, the relationship to the deceased i.e. brother, mother, friend is likely to affect the level of grief experienced. Secondly, the nature of the attachment; this includes attachment strength and security, ambivalence in the relationship, past conflicts with the deceased and the level of dependency the bereaved had on the deceased.

Thirdly, the mode of death is proposed to affect grief level. This factor includes items such as sudden or unexpected death, violent or traumatic death, the proximity to the deceased, multiple deaths at one time or whether the death is perceived as preventable. It also includes stigmatised death in that deaths from things such as AIDS or suicide usually have a certain social stigma attached to them and ambivalent death i.e. a soldier missing in action.

The fourth mediator is that of historical antecedents where a person’s mental health background and previous losses they have experienced could influence how the current death is handled. Unresolved issues from previous losses are likely to compound and exacerbate the current one.

Personality differences are yet another mediator, age and gender, as well as coping and cognitive style (how well a person handles stress and whether they are an optimistic or pessimistic person) are hypothesised to affect a person’s grief response. Other sub-items include the mourners’ attachment style, their ego strength and assumptive world beliefs and values.

The sixth mediator suggested is that of social variables; perceived social and emotional supports as well as satisfaction with the calibre and level of this support are but two sub-items within this group. On a slightly different tangent but still within this mediator a bereaved person’s social role and whether they have another one to fulfil as well as religious beliefs and any ethnic group expectations can also influence how a person grieves.

Lastly concurrent life stressors need to be considered when trying to evaluate the reasons behind a mourner’s level of grief. For example, the death might bring about other financial hardships within a family due to the loss of the primary salary earner and in turn could complicate and influence a person’s ability to deal with their grief in an auspicious manner.

Within such a vast field of study as that of grief, one finds literally hundreds of empirical research studies all with their own results, some of which support the aforementioned factors and others that minimise their impact or deny their affect completely. For example Bonanno et. al. found empirical support for a number of the factors thought to influence a person’s grief reaction. They found that chronic grievers were more likely to have been overly dependent on the deceased, evidence that has been replicated elsewhere (Opperman & Novello) and to have less emotional and social support.

However the idea that people with complicated grief reactions have less emotional and social support is contradicted by other evidence. This same Opperman and Novello paper suggesting there is no significant evidence to suggest that social or emotional support can influence a person’s grief level. Although the sample size in this study was extremely small the participants were all chronic grievers, of whom 77% claimed that the emotional and social support they received from family leading up to and after the burial was ample. Similarly, The Scott and White Grief Study found that the level of social support available had no significant correlation with grief level.

All this taken into consideration, it is likely that these social variables are still valid as there is plenty of other research to suggest that this mediator does make a difference. Curtis and Newman examined nine studies of childhood bereavement, and although the support was only moderate in nature, it was still positive. But as with Opperman and Novello’s study there are a number of contributing factors that bring the results integrity into question including extremely small sample sizes, no control group, high levels of attrition and the short time scales between pre and post-intervention tests.

Probably the largest and most prevalent factor observed in all the papers examined is the age of the decedent, with the onus that the younger a person is when they die, the more intense a bereaved person’s grief will be. Nowhere in any of the empirical studies perused was any contradictory evidence found.

Boyle, Vance, Najman and Thearle found that parents dealing with the loss of a young child are more likely to have an intense grief reaction than other groups. Likewise these results were mimicked in both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of The Scott and White Grief Study but across a range of domains rather than just parents who have lost young children.

The sense of outrage involved with this kind of ‘out of order’ death will be much harder for someone with a rigid world view that lacks plasticity, to assimilate the loss as a part of life, than someone who can accept it and attempt to deal with and move past the grief felt. A mother who loses her child from SIDS is more likely to react in a complicated manner than an elderly man who loses his brother to natural causes.

The age of the bereaved is another element that needs consideration; parentally bereaved children will all react differently based on their age, and significant gender differences have been found between males and females with men more likely to react in aggressive ways.

Another mediator that is quite prevalent in the literature is the mode of death which includes such sub-categories as traumatic, unexpected and stigmatised. Guilt, blame, desire for revenge are all emotions that can be felt by grievers and Weinberg found that the mode of death could influence these and a person’s ability to mourn the loss in a healthy fashion. Evidence suggests that those who experienced an unnatural death of a loved one, or who blamed themselves for the death, would take significantly longer to grieve and experience delayed recovery from bereavement compared with those whose loved one died naturally, or those who didn’t have any self-blame.

Other research also suggests that in children the mode of death of a parent can influence the amount of grief experienced . While in elderly people, Bonanno et. al. found them more likely to fall within the resilient group with 45.9% of their sample being included. It is hypothesised, and supported by the aforementioned paper, that not only do older people begin to mentally prepare themselves for the passing on of friends and family, but that natural deaths of old age are likely easier for people to assimilate and accept as ‘part of life’. This lends support to not only the mode of death mediator but also the idea that age plays a role in grief.

That being said, Gamino, Sewell and Easterling have had contradictory evidence emerge from their work with Phase 2 of their study having support for things in which Phase 1 had no support. Phase 1 found no significant empirical evidence to suggest that sudden, unexpected or traumatic loss would influence grief levels, nor would a lengthy illness, knowledge that death was imminent or believing the death was preventable. Phase 2 on the contrary found significant support for the idea that the traumatic or unexpected nature of a death, as well as the perception of preventability could both influence whether a person would develop chronic grief. Also, although the length of an illness was not significant in either report, in Phase 2 it fell just shy of statistical significance.

This is a prime example of some of the problems encountered in such a delicate field as research into people’s grief, as the problems previously mentioned could have influenced these studies in some way also.

When it comes to ambivalent relationships or relationships with negative connotations attached to them Bonanno et. al. found no significant evidence to support any difference between the chronic grievers and resilient group, however Gamino, Sewell and Easterling did find significant evidence to suggest that those with good quality relationships with the deceased are more likely to experience chronic grief than those without. More research is needed on this area as it is easy to hypothesise reasons why ambivalent relationships or those with negative connotations attached to them would either have difficulty or ease dealing with the death. Some may move on easily as they are, for lack of a better description, happy to see the person go, however others may have difficulty dealing with the situation because of the ambivalence in their relationship or the negative connotations, they may not be able to grieve properly because of the anger and other such emotions within their relationship and subsequently develop complicated grief.

As a final point, religion or having a spiritual nature as a coping tool has been proven to be significant. In reviewing 31 studies about grief and religion, Becker et. al. found that 28 of these studies reported significant positive effects on the bereavement process with only one study reporting a negative effect of religion or spirituality on a mourner’s level of grief.

In summation, all the research papers examined may not label mediators of grief exactly as laid out in this paper, but the labels they have assigned do quite easily integrate into the ones set out here. There are also a number of smaller mediators that have not been examined here, but are all still likely to influence the reasons why one person experiences chronic grief and another is resilient. We found an enormous amount of empirical research, with a large majority of it supporting the aforementioned mediators, and in cases where the evidence was negative in nature, a number of reasons put the validity of their results into question (small sample sizes, short periods between pre and post tests, large attrition rates to name but a few).

Even with this mountain of research that has been conducted already, many questions still remain unanswered. In part due to these contradictory studies and statistical reliability problems that plague even the most experienced researcher, and in part to the nature of grief in and of itself making the process of studying it a very delicate one. However it is quite obvious, that while some factors will play a larger role in predicting chronic sufferers of grief versus resilient people, all the mediators mentioned do play some role. It is unlikely that any time in the near future we will formulate a step by step guide to dealing with grief; it will more likely need to be mouldable to each individuals reactions, like the plasticity these same individuals will need to move on with their lives.

Then, later that year on June 4th a brutal murder was discovered in Sydney at the Sydney Domain Baths beneath the dressing sheds. The body was that of Alfred Greenfield who was nude, had been stabbed more than 30 times and had had his genitals removed. Detectives almost immediately labelled it as a homosexual assault.

Later that same year yet another victim of the killer now labelled ‘The Mutilator’ was found in a public toilet in Moore Park. William Cobbin had been stabbed and had his body mutilated.

It wasn’t until 31st March, 1962 that MacDonald would strike again; at the time investigators on the case were scouring homosexual hangouts attempting to find leads and witnesses. Frank Gladstone McLean became the 4th victim of The Mutilator when he was found, mortally wounded in Darlinghurst. Although he was alive when found he died a short time later without having the chance to offer a description of his attacker to anybody.

By mid-November 1962 MacDonald had yet again given in to his self-confessed compulsion to kill although at first it was thought he had become a victim. Shop owners in the suburb of Concord filed official complaints of a rancid odour coming from William MacDonald’s recently purchased shop and when it was established he hadn’t been seen since November 4th searchers held grave fears for his safety. Eventually they located the body of a man under the shop floor, once again the victim had been stabbed to death with a total 41 stab wounds and had had his genitals slashed.

Eventually clothing beside the body was traced through a laundry mark on it and the victim was actually identified as Irishman Patrick Hackett. Subsequently the search for William MacDonald begun again.
On April 22nd 1963 a former co-worker of MacDonald’s spotted him on a Sydney street after an indentikit photo of him was released in the national press. By late May, although he had attempted to disguise himself he was traced to his new job in a Melbourne railway station under the alias of David Allan.
When he was interrogated MacDonald confessed not only his identity but to all the murders he had committed and he blamed it on an irresistible impulse to kill. The reason for this irresistible impulse though i hear you ask? As a teenager he had been raped by another man and as such chose homosexual men at random for slaughter in a misguided attempt to deal with his anger. Given a life sentence and sent to Long Bay Correctional Centre but was later transferred to Morriset Home for the Criminally Insane. Today he resides within Long Bay Hospital and is the labelled as the longest serving inmate in Australia’s correctional service history.

Here though we have on offer some of the art works that this demented and evil individual painted before his death. In the next few weeks we will write up a paper detailing everything that went on in the case as well as put up crime scene photos, transcripts from his interrogation and comments made by legendary FBI profiler Robert K Ressler (retired), who coincidentally is one of my favourite true crime writers and has personally been involved with hundreds of well known cases in his time. From memory, one of these art works was actually painted for Mr Ressler, i believe the self-portrait, but i will confirm that at a later stage.

However there are a large number of obstructions to overcome with the connectionist computational theory of mind, and although proponents of it want us to give up on rule-based systems of explanation such as the classicists version, these things need to be rectified before it can be considered a sufficient theory of mind.

Although the connectionist version has a viable approach to association processing it seems to fail on such tasks as language and reasoning. The hindrances range in magnitude from minute to monstrous and include quandaries such as problems with the concept of an individual, the problem of compositionality, the problem of quantification, recursive thoughts/propositional problems, trouble with commonsense questions and last but not least the problem of systematicity.

The problem with the concept of an individual is an painless point to understand but is not so easily solved. If we have a set of identical twins or even something a bit more general like two trees of the same species, height, age etc. the connectionist system is blind to the fact that they are actually separate entities. There are a number of proposed responses to this dilemma but none of them are adequate.

The archetypal property of all our languages is compositionality and this is where another predicament with the connectionist CTM occurs. Representations are built out of parts and have their meaning based on the meanings of all the parts and from the way they are combined. Subsequently, due to the fact that our thoughts are built out of concepts, and are not stored as whole entities within our mind, we encounter major problems and all the attempts to rectify them turn out to be substandard halfway measures. After all, babies eating slugs, and slugs eating babies are two very distinct ideas whose meanings are assembled on the fly using syntax, and even though you may never have seen either sentence before you can understand it with ease.

Systematicity on the other hand seems to be one of the more obtrusive problems the connectionist CTM must face, and was identified by Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988). It states that the ability to think/create/understand a sentence of a particular structure is intrinsically connected to the ability to think/create/understand a sentence that has a related structure, in that, there is no human that can understand the meaning of the sentence “Jason loves Ashley” but fails to understand the concept of “Ashley loves Jason”. Regrettably though, connectionist models, even once they have been trained to recognize one sentence of the previous example, still fail to recognize the second. Systematicity must be guaranteed to work in connectionist models for their theory of mind to be a viable option as this is a key component of human intelligence, and, according to Fodor & Pylyshyn, is a given in the classicists approach.

The connectionist computational theory of mind, although on distant inspection appears to be a much healthier option than other models, seems to have just as many drawbacks as them, and once again, cannot be considered a viable option for a complete theory of mind without at least some of these issues being overcome.

The ones we have discussed would be a good starting point but there are also other smaller, but still very relevant ones that must be addressed. Such as, the length of time it takes to train a connectionist model vs the length of time it takes a human to learn similar tasks, the fact that back propagation in connectionist models appears to ‘cheat’ as there is no evidence of our minds working in such ways and the fact that connectionist models fail to recognize our recursive thoughts i.e. a proposition embedded within another proposition. Until such times as these are solved, the connectionist CTM is promising, but still has a lot of work ahead of it.

The main purpose of studying said remains is to establish race, gender and age and also attempt to discover any trauma to the bone structure, that is, whether it has been cracked, smashed, has cut marks from a knife blade etc. This can be a very handy thing indeed as it can help prove mode of death as there is no flesh for a pathologist to conduct a traditional autopsy upon.

We will continue to add more articles to this section as time goes by regarding every aspect of forensic anthropology, so stay tuned!

As can be anticipated, most peoples conception of what a forensic psychologist (or psychiatrist) does is fairly generalised; the vast majority envision that a forensic psychologist is simply a ‘profiler’, working in some capacity within law enforcement advising police and other detectives of their UNSUB’s (unknown subject) criminal profile. This is probably the most glamorous role within the field, and something i would personally hope to do in the future! But realistically there are a large number of jobs that be conducted by a forensic psychologist, least of which is the aforementioned one. Lets talk about some of these now…

To start with, forensic simply means ‘pertaining to a court of law’ or ‘of the law’, so a forensic psychologist or psychiatrist is simply a psychologist/psychiatrist that specialises in the criminal justice system. The more common roles that a forensic psychologist will undertake include:

1. They provide expert psychological evidence in trials, sometimes verbal but more often through the means of written reports (psychological testing of a defendant etc is often undertaken to analyse competency or in cases where child protection is an issue).
2. They consult with legal/law and other related professionals on various things ranging from impact of court proceedings on witnesses and testimony, liaise with police investigations, help with crime prevention, child protection and victim’s needs among others.
3. They develop and conduct research, and provide clinical services to persons within the criminal justice system. This includes things such as treatment of people with substance abuse disorders, therapy for crime victims, assessing and treating offenders – usually during incarceration and after release on parole as well as things such as counselling children who have been affected by the divorce of their parents.

In time we will be adding various articles on to this section of the website covering every aspect of forensic psychology, statistical analysis and other key areas of study you need to be au fait with.

As far back as the 1970’s researchers have been conducting systematic studies on complex areas of human perception including our visual abilities. Early research focused on eye movements in general and how they react to certain situations and stimuli but also on change blindness and the reasons behind it.

Initially change blindness explorations focused on text and simple pictures, but more recently studies have extended towards complex scenes and representations. A number of these studies have used the saccade as their prominent time to make alterations to the scenes and representations, but another method was also devised referred to as the ‘flicker task’. This involves a process where a blank slide is inserted between two slides depicting a very similar scene and participants are required to find the change made.

A number of different experiments were also conducted by Simons and Levin; in one of these, participants were randomly approached in the street by a pedestrian asking for directions, but during this interaction the pedestrian was replaced by someone else. Only half of the participants detected the change. In another study participants were required to watch a short film in which arbitrarily placed, as well as centre of attention, objects were removed or modified during angle changes or ‘cuts’. In a separate condition within this same experiment the main actor was swapped during an angle change. Again very few participants noticed the changes. Levin and Simons acknowledge that even when objects are the centre of attention we more often than not fail to detect any change.

However in this current avenue of research the affect that sound has on our ability to detect change between cuts in a film, as well as more generally our ability to simply detect change in that same film, is examined.

Research on the affect of sound and how it influences our ability to detect change is lacking. Thus it is hypothesised that more changes will be detected by participants on their second viewing of the short edited film than on the first, and that those who watch the film without sound will detect a larger amount of changes than those who have the distraction of sound present.

Method
Participants
Participants in this study were 306 undergraduate students at Macquarie University comprising 82 males and 224 females (M = 20.51 years, SD = 5.07).

Design
Students were randomly assigned to one of two possible conditions, based on their practical class on campus. In the first condition the experiment was run as a repeated measures, within groups design while the second condition was a repeated measures, between groups design.

Materials
Students were shown a short edited film (Simons, 2003) in a classroom environment of approximately 30 students per class using a ceiling mounted data projector and wall mounted projector screen which was a maximum of 15 feet away.

Procedure
In both conditions students watched a short edited film on two separate occasions; however condition one had sound while condition two had no sound. On the first watch of each condition no instructions were given except to “Pay close attention”. Upon completion students were asked to note anything unusual that occurred in the film.

Participants were then informed that changes occurred between each scene cut and were asked to watch the film a second time noting any changes.

Upon completion of the second viewing the number of changes detected was marked by a neighbour to avoid any extraneous variables or biases.

Results
Differences between first and second viewing. Number of changes detected on the second viewing (M = 1.92, SD = 1.20) were much higher than on the first (M = 0.14, SD = 0.48). In addition to this, our t-test revealed a significant difference between the two means with our calculated t of 25.80 exceeding the critical t of 1.96 (from tables).

Differences between sound and no sound conditions. In this condition the number of changes detected was higher in the no sound group (M = 2.11, SD = 1.27) than in the sound group (M = 1.73, SD = 1.11). Again our t test revealed that the difference between our two means was a significant one; our calculated t of 2.76 exceeded the critical t of 1.96 (from tables).

Discussion
The aforementioned statistics support the overall hypotheses as the null hypotheses, that there is no difference between the means, were rejected on both occasions. The number of changes detected was much larger in the second viewing than in the first, however even after having watched the edited film once, participants in the no sound condition detected more changes than the people in the sound condition.

This supports the idea that even when participants have heard a conversation before, which was the case in this study, they are still distracted by the presence of sound. The results for the first viewing versus the second viewing also fortify other research into change blindness; people have a habit of failing to detect considerably significant changes to scenes, even when they occur to centre of attention objects, as was the case in Levin and Simons experiments as well as others.

The reasons for peoples inability to detect these changes is linked not only to our attentiveness but on a much deeper level our evolution. Our visual processing systems have evolved in such a way that it can take advantage of the structure of natural scenes as well as by using bodily motion and locomotion to take cognitive shortcuts and reduce load on a person’s cognitive system.

However the current study appears to have a number of limitations, slight as they are, that may have influenced the results. Firstly, even with instructions to not talk about the research being conducted with friends during the data collection phase there is no guarantee that a lot of participants followed these instructions. Secondly, the viewing conditions for the edited film differed from classroom to classroom and were not kept constant; some participants were sitting directly in front of the projector screen while others were off to one side and various other scenarios. Thirdly, time of day could play a role in number of changes detected in that as the day drags on people get more tired and less attentive and are less likely to detect the changes.

It would be difficult to combat all of these problems as people are always going to talk to their friends, and it is unlikely that all the data gathering can be conducted at an exact time of day, however to control environmental pressures it would be advisable to at least control the viewing angle and distance from the film being watched as research has suggested that the size of the presentation being watched can influence detection ability.

Further research should attempt to investigate if sound alone plays a role in change detection i.e. have participants watch an edited film with changes such as the one used in this study but have completely irrelevant sound playing over the top of it. It has been accepted that for us to notice change we need to be attentive to the object that has changed. Whether the lack of change detection is due to sound in general or the fact that subjects are paying more attention to the conversation in said film needs to be confirmed.

In closing, the detection of changes in real life scenarios as well as complex and simple representations appears to be influenced by a number of different factors, one of which is sound. Only with further research on slightly different tangents will we discover how large a role sound plays on our attentiveness and ability to detect changes as a whole.