Curt Carlson

Curt Carlson is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Special Education at East Texas A&M University (ETAMU), within the College of Education and Human Services. He has been a faculty member since 2008, advancing from Assistant to Associate to full Professor by 2020. He also serves as Coordinator for the General Psychology Masters and Experimental Psychology Ph.D. programs.

His educational background includes a Ph.D. and M.S. in Experimental/Cognitive Psychology from the University of Oklahoma (2008, 2004) and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2002).

Dr. Carlson is a cognitive psychologist whose research focuses on face perception, recognition memory, and eyewitness identification. His work bridges psychology and law, aiming to reduce wrongful convictions caused by mistaken eyewitness testimony. He leads the CriMe Lab, where behavioral experiments are conducted to improve police lineup procedures and eyewitness evidence reliability.

His recent publications examine unconscious transference, sleep effects on memory, juror evaluation of eyewitness confidence, and lineup design. These studies reflect a consistent trend in applying cognitive science to real-world legal problems, particularly in enhancing the accuracy of eyewitness identification across various procedural and estimator variables.

• Principal Investigator of Grant from National Institute of Justice ($344K), 2019–2022
• Interviewed by the Discovery Channel, 2018
• Professor of the Year, Keck Family Education Awards Ceremony, 2017

Dr. Carlson actively involves students in research, advising them through apprenticeships and co-authoring publications. His lab has received external funding from the National Institute of Justice and the Charles Koch Foundation. He is working on revising an NSF grant proposal for 2025. The CriMe Lab's work has been cited in a National Academy of Sciences report and featured on ETAMU’s front page.

The CriMe Lab conducts applied research on perception, attention, memory, and decision-making in the context of eyewitness identification. It investigates estimator variables (e.g., weapon presence, distance, crime duration) and system variables (e.g., lineup type, confidence statements). The lab also explores how jurors interpret eyewitness evidence and is expanding into sleep and cognitive state effects on memory.