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Throughout Chapter 5, we emphasized how little information people seem to gain about stimuli that are plainly visible (or plainly audible) if they aren't paying attention to these stimuli. As a result, people fail to see a gorilla that's directly in front of their eyes, a large-scale color change that's plainly in view, and more. Think about what this means for law enforcement. Imagine a customer in a bank during a robbery. Maybe the customer waited in line directly behind the robber. Will the customer remember what the robber looked like? Will the customer remember the robber's clothing? There's no way to tell unless we have some indicatiqaaf what the customer was paying attention to, even though the t's robber's appearance and clothing were prominent stimuli in customer's environment. Of course, the factors governing a witness's attention will vary from witness to witness and from crime to crime. One factor, though, is often important: the presence of a weapon during the crime. If a gun is in view, then of course witnesses will want to know whether it's pointed at them and whether the criminal's finger is on the trigger. After all, what else in the scene could be more important to the witnesses? But with this focus on the weapon, other elements in the scene will be unattended, so that the witnesses will fail to notice, and later on fail to remember, many bits of information that are crucial for law enforcement. Consistent with these suggestions, witnesses to crimes involving weapons are often said to show a pattern called "weapon focus." They're able to report to the police many details about the weapon (its size, its color) and, often, details about the hand that was holding the weapon (e.g., whether the person was wearing any rings or a bracelet). However, because of this focus, the witnesses may have a relatively poor memory for other aspects of the scene- including the crucial information of what the perpetrator looked like. In fact, studies suggest that eyewitness identifications of the