Introduction:
Welcome to the Salk Institute’s Where Cures Begin podcast, where scientists talk about breakthrough discoveries with your hosts, Allie Akmal and Brittany Fair.

Brittany Fair:

I’m here today with neuroscientist Thomas Albright. He is a professor and the director of The Vision Center Laboratory, where he studies how humans perceive and remember the world. Most recently, he has applied his expertise to develop a new method for eyewitness identification based on the neuroscience of perception. Professor Albright, welcome to Where Cures Begin.

Professor Thomas Albright:

Thank you, it’s a pleasure.

Brittany Fair:

Professor Albright, where are you originally from?

Thomas Albright:

Well, I was born in Washington, D.C. My parents were from the South—North Carolina and Georgia, but they met in Washington. My father was an electrical engineer and was involved in the design of flight radar systems. Where my mother was [laughter] a food scientist who was the resident sweet potato expert at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Brittany Fair:

What does it mean to be a sweet potato expert?

Thomas Albright:

Well, this was in a period of time—this was not long after the Second World War and the United States government was trying to promote the use of sweet potatoes as food, and most Americans at the time were pretty unfamiliar with sweet potatoes. They’re not native to North America. And so my mother was involved in testing different kinds of recipes for sweet potatoes and promoting this for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Brittany Fair:

Interesting. So growing up as a kid, did you eat a lot of dishes with different types of sweet potatoes?

Thomas Albright:

I ate a lot of sweet potatoes. And in fact, I don’t really like sweet potatoes.

Brittany Fair:

Oh, no [laugh]

Thomas Albright:

I’m very proud of my mother, but I’m not a fan of sweet potatoes.

Brittany Fair:

And how did you go from growing up in a family who’s obviously, very well educated and engaged with the scientific field, like what drew you personally to science?

Thomas Albright:

Well, I think I was originally thinking of being a mathematician or an engineer. My father was an engineer. My father died young however, I was just 14.

Brittany Fair:

Oh, wow.

Thomas Albright:

I sort of went off the rails and was kind of aimless for a while, so I never became a mathematician or an engineer. But when I was an undergraduate, I went to the University of Maryland and I started taking courses in what was then called physiological psychology, but was actually neuroscience—I got totally inspired by that. This was in the mid 1970s and neuroscience was really taking off at that point. I worked in a laboratory at the University of Maryland, where there was research going on studying the visual system in birds. It turns out, birds have extraordinarily good vision. And so I got that laboratory experience and I liked it and I thought, “Well, I’d like to do more of this.”

And I got into Princeton University. It was an opportunity to work for a man named Charlie Gross, who was a well-known neuroscientist at the time. It was a pretty exciting time because we were at the time, trying to figure out how the visual cortex, the part of the brain that’s involved in visual perception—which in primates, is an enormous amount of the brain. And so we were trying to characterize the different parts of this visual cortex. And then I had an opportunity to stay on at Princeton as a postdoc.

Brittany Fair:

And what drew you from the East coast, from Princeton all the way to Salk?

Thomas Albright:

I’d heard about the Salk Institute and it had a reputation of course for highly collaborative interdisciplinary research, but the truth is, I didn’t know much about it. But I did know that Francis Crick was here and Francis, at the time, was pushing to build systems neuroscience at the Salk Institute. And so Francis was making an effort to build up a research community at the Salk to focus on how the visual system is organized and how it works. So I came out to the Salk and met with a bunch of people and decided this was the right place for me. It’s also true that San Diego in general—at that time and still is, pretty much the center of the universe for neuroscience research. So it was a pretty easy choice.

Brittany Fair:

And what are you now studying here at Salk?

Thomas Albright:

So we have been in my laboratory for many years, studying the brain basis of visual perception, visual memory and visually guided behavior in which we monitor the activity of cells in the brain and look at correlations between that activity and reports of perceptual state. So for example, if you tell me you “see the color red” and I find cells in the brain that respond, and respond simply means that they change their rate of communication, if those cells respond when you say you “see the color red,” then I can infer that those cells are underlying your perception of the color red.

Brittany Fair:

Okay.

Thomas Albright:

That’s a general approach.

Brittany Fair:

Are there actually specific cells that perceive certain colors like that example?

Thomas Albright:

Oh yes. And even more remarkable, there are cells that encode specific faces. So face recognition is a really important part of human experience. We’re very social animals and we depend upon the ability to recognize individuals by their faces and recognize their emotional states, their desires and their intentions. So there’s a very sophisticated system in your brain for face recognition.

Brittany Fair:

And right now, you’re studying eyewitness identification. What is eyewitness identification, and is that a problem in our society?

Thomas Albright:

Well, eyewitness identification is the procedure that is very commonly used as a means to figure out who is the perpetrator of a crime. And so the basic idea is that you might, for a variety of reasons, witness criminal activity, and you have some memory of those events which include in many cases, a memory of the face of the person who committed the crime. So oftentimes witnesses will give the police descriptions of the person who was committing the crime.

Movie clip:

Man:
How about his face, did you see it?

Woman:

Yes, sir. Got a good look.

Man:

Would you know him if you saw him again?

Woman:

I certainly would. Dark hair, almost black, kind of curly, a little wave right here in front.

Man:

I see.

Woman:

Blue eyes, dark blue. Might’ve been kind of hazel, dark…

Thomas Albright:

And so the police do their detective work and they find somebody who could have been the perpetrator for a variety of reasons. They bring that person into the police department. Usually, a lineup in this country is six people, total. And the witnesses is brought in and asked to identify the perpetrator, if they see them in the line.

TV clip:

Policeman:

Mr. Montoya, step right up. Mr. Montoya, I want you to look at these people very carefully.

Witness:

Number three or one, definitely three or one.

Policewoman:

Good choice…

Thomas Albright:

So that’s the process by which it works. In fact, today it’s typically done with photographs because it’s a lot easier than gathering real people together. There are a number of reasons to believe that eyewitnesses identify the wrong people. There are legal advocacy organizations like the Innocence Project working out of New York City that looked at cases where there was reason to be suspicious about the conviction decision that was made. And they lobbied the courts for the ability to do a postconviction DNA analysis.

News clip:

News Anchor:

He has been behind bars most of his adult life for a crime he said he “did not commit,” until today.

Lawyer:

Mr. Miller, who was convicted of a rape, did not participate in that sexual assault.

News Anchor:

17 years later, with new DNA evidence on the table, Christopher Miller is expected to be released from jail after a judge granted him a new trial. Our Tara Molina was in court and she’s bringing us…

Thomas Albright:

And there are now between 350 and 400 cases of this sort, where people have been exonerated based on postconviction DNA analysis. That is to say that, the DNA at the crime scene is not the DNA of the person who’s in prison. And then you can ask, “Well, what’s the reason why those people were convicted to begin with?” And it turns out, that in approximately 70% of those cases, the major cause for conviction and the major piece of evidence, was misidentification by an eyewitness.

Brittany Fair:

Wow. That’s a lot. That’s a huge percentage.

Thomas Albright:

Yeah. And that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. Because there are a lot of people in jail for which this postconviction DNA analysis has never been done.

Brittany Fair:

So why is the human visual system or visual memory or perception so bad at remembering and recalling faces?

Thomas Albright:

Well, it’s a signal to noise problem. In fact, there are signals in the environment and there’s lots of sources of noise in the environment and what your visual system needs to do is, identify what was the cause of the pattern of light on the back of your eye. And given a variety of noise sources, that becomes difficult. And there are similarly sources of noise associated with your memory. I chaired a committee for the National Academy of Sciences that looked at the problem of eyewitness identification and the validity of eyewitness identification. And we looked at the science of this, and it was becoming increasingly clear that taking this signal processing perspective was a very useful way of thinking about the eyewitness problem and developing ways to mitigate the problem.

Brittany Fair:

Absolutely. So what have you done in your own research to help fix the problem and rectify so many innocent people going to jail?

Thomas Albright:

Started thinking a lot about the problem of eyewitness identification. So I thought, “There must be a better way of doing a lineup.” And one of those methods is something called perceptual scaling. The goal of perceptual scaling is to identify the relative strengths of some signal with respect to a standard. So the example I usually give is, when you go to the optometrist, the optometrist wants to identify a corrective lens that maximizes your visual acuity. And the optometrist could just ask you to say, “Well, this one is best, this one’s second best, this one’s third best.” But the problem with that is, that people are really not very good at making those sorts of absolute judgments about things. People are really good at making relative judgements. So if you ask the patient, “Here are two lenses, which of these is clearer?” You’ll get a very reliable answer.

And we thought perfect, for the problem of eyewitness identification. So we present two faces at the same time. And we simply ask, “Which of these two faces looks more similar to the person that you recall from the crime scene?” And from that, we can scale the faces with respect to their similarity to your memory of what you saw at the crime scene. And we simply use a statistical procedure to look at the scaling data, to identify the face that is most likely to be the person from the crime scene.

Brittany Fair:

Okay. And is this more accurate than if you were just shown six faces at the same time?

Thomas Albright:

That’s a really good question. It’s certainly less susceptible to bias. And for that reason, potentially more accurate. To know the extent to which it’s more accurate, we developed this procedure and published it because it has an enormous potential, we believe. One advantage that this procedure has over other procedures is that it can give you a quantitative measure of the certainty of an individual witness, which will be very valuable. Because right now, witnesses are typically asked to say how certain they are, the method that we’ve developed enables us, using a statistical technique to quantify how certain the witness’ report is based on the data that we collected from.

Brittany Fair:

Are you going to test this new method in the field at all?

Thomas Albright:

Yeah. Well, there’s a couple of directions that we want to go in with this. And one of them, is testing it in the field. There’s no police department, or no prosecuting attorney, or no defense attorney that’s going to allow us to go in and use this new procedure without it being quantitatively compared in the field to other methods. And so what we would have to do is, apply the traditional approach, say six faces at the same time to get an answer from the witness using that method, and then apply immediately after that, our new procedure and see if it gives the same answer or see if it has even greater accuracy than the method that’s traditionally applied. And there may be ways to approach that. But the general goal of testing this out in the field is something that’s incredibly important. If the criminal justice community is going to take this seriously, then that’s really the gold standard that we have to meet. It has to work in the field.

[Law & Order sound clip]

Brittany Fair:

How did you originally become interested in the criminal justice system and working to improve eyewitness identification?

Thomas Albright:

I had repeatedly thought about these kinds of issues and what visual science can contribute. And then, out of the blue in late 2013, I got a call from a person who works at the National Academy of Sciences who asked me if I was interested in being the co-chair of a committee to look at the validity of eyewitness identification procedures. It just seemed like a terrific thing to do. And I completely threw myself into it. I became sort of a champion for scientific approach to these kinds of criminal justice problems. And I was at one point, invited to join the National Commission on Forensic Science. And the commission was charged with advising the U.S. Department of Justice on how forensic science might be improved. It makes people very uncomfortable in American society today, to send innocent people to jail.

[Dragnet sound clip]

Brittany Fair:

Outside of all of your work at Salk, what do you kind of do for fun in San Diego?

Thomas Albright:

[laugh] Well, I like to build things. I got into science initially, in part, because I like to work with my hands. And so my outlet is—I live in an older house on a big lot in the woods. I’ve taken this quarantine time to build a natural stone patio and a retaining wall behind my house, and fire pits. And I put the same attention to detail into these projects that I do in science. And I have to say there’s something enormously satisfying about designing and creating something that’s new and beautiful. I think it’s also therapeutic. And I think that it challenges myself both physically and mentally. And a lot of this is just sort of the problem of figuring things out. How do you put stuff together so that it works? I think that’s the key to survival as you get older. But I spend a lot of time with architects these days. I belong to an organization called the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.

Brittany Fair:

Have you ever looked at the neuroscience that attracts people to certain buildings or certain architectural feats?

Thomas Albright:

One of the aims of this organization, the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, is to try and understand experimentally, what it is about buildings that draws people to them. And that’s a complex question. There’s a question of aesthetics. There’s a question of ease of use of the facility. There’s a question of how the facility, the building, organizes people and sort of social groups within that space and how that, ultimately, facilitates what happens in that space. A good example of that of course, is the design of classrooms for children. Typically, classrooms are large social groups and the design of the space can actually have an influence over the way the children interact in that space. And as much as we can understand that, we can then sort of use those bits of knowledge to guide the design of new environments.

Brittany Fair:

And when you say the shape of the space, do you mean a building that is either square, or circular, or oblong, or do you mean physical things that are on the walls of the ceiling?

Thomas Albright:

Yes. I mean all of those things. Whether the walls are square or rounded, or the height of the ceilings, the amount of natural light in the space or the type and amount of artificial light, the direction in which the windows face and so on. There’s an enormous number of variables here that we’re talking about. And collectively, those things affect the way that we respond to that space.

Brittany Fair:

And what are some things that someone could do to their own space or office if they want it to be more productive, per se?

Thomas Albright:

So I’ll tell you about a project that I got involved in with a school classroom. This is a middle school in Baltimore. I teamed up with an architect by the name of Jim Determan. [people playing basketball] And the goal was to redesign the space to achieve two things that we thought would be beneficial to the students. One, is to improve academic performance and the other, was to reduce stress levels. And the underlying belief is that those two things are inversely correlated. That as the stress levels go up, the academic performance goes down. So the manipulation involved is broadly referred to as your biophilic design. Knowing something about the way that the visual parts of the cerebral cortex are organized, I made predictions about the kinds of stimuli that would be best in that kind of environment.

And roughly speaking, it’s a lot of natural shapes. And so we populated the walls of this classroom with those shapes, and it was a very simple manipulation. And then we used another classroom of the same grade kids as a control. And what we found, was a striking improvement in academic performance in the experimental group and a striking reduction in stress levels. It’s a revealing first attempt to see how simple manipulations of the design of a space can actually improve the performance of people in that space.

Brittany Fair:

How has the architecture at the Salk Institute that was designed by famous architect, Louis Kahn, affected your science?

Thomas Albright:

That’s a very complicated question. The Salk is an extraordinary building and I’m absolutely certain—and I know a lot of other people feel the same, that the building itself, the environment, the physical structure of the space and of course its location, has greatly facilitated the science that I do. I feel strongly that the environment influences the way that I think and the way that I do experiments and the insights that I get from them. You might ask, “Well, what is it about that environment that causes that improvement in performance, if you will?” The shape of the building and it’s siting on the canyon, looking down to the Pacific Ocean is probably one of the most dramatic things about the space. And that drama, I think, sort of enhances thought in some way.

And again, this is not something that anybody has studied scientifically. It’s just the intuition that people have about the building. These kinds of effects are probably the most complex kinds of effects to really nail down experimentally. And it’s the site, it’s the sound, it’s the smell, it’s the feel of the air, it’s the knowledge of the history of the place, and all this comes together to yield to a pretty powerful response in most people. But we’re nowhere close to understanding how that actually happens.

Brittany Fair:

And do you have any current research projects that involve architecture?

Thomas Albright:

Well, we did a project with a group in Boston, and the goal was to improve performance of people with dementia in a dementia care facility. There are places where everything looks the same. The goal was to capitalize upon technology to try and guide people through the space. And so we did a little pilot study on this. The patients wear Bluetooth armbands and those armbands are unique to an individual, they’re picked up by sensors in the wall, and there are video displays in the hallway that will then identify the individual and provide a message that’s unique to that person. Like “Good morning, John. Breakfast is down the hall on your left,” or, “Good afternoon, Bob. There’s a reading room down the hall to your right,” that kind of thing. Which we found reduces a lot of what are called negative behaviors on the parts of the people who are living in these facilities. So they seem to be coping better as a result of less confusion, which was brought about by our manipulation.

So it’s a very simple thing, but it’s again, an experiment in which we tried to manipulate the environment, in this way dynamically, to facilitate the performance of a very specific population.

Brittany Fair:

Well, and it’s so interesting because it’s something that could really have an impact on peoples’ lives.

Thomas Albright:

Yeah, I think so. This is the behavioral approach, which actually is fairly easy to do and appears to work.

Brittany Fair:

That’s amazing and absolutely fascinating. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I really appreciate you speaking with us about your work and for being here. Thank you so much again.

Thomas Albright:

It’s my pleasure.

Ending:

Join us next time for more cutting-edge Salk science. At Salk, world renowned scientists work together to explore big, bold ideas, from cancer to Alzheimer’s, aging to climate change. Where Cures Begin is a production of the Salk Institute’s office of communications. To learn more about the research discussed today, visit salk.edu/podcast.