How Surveillance Review Affects Your Brain
In December 2024, consumers of mainstream news were constantly exposed to footage of a lone gunman brandishing a firearm and fatally shooting a chief executive officer on a Manhattan street.
The general public was spared the graphic moments when the executive was killed. Those charged with identifying the subject and pursuing justice were not; they likely viewed the moments when one individual took the life of another hundreds if not thousands of times as they attempted to gather the intelligence necessary to aid in the successful apprehension and prosecution of the gunman.
With the current ubiquitous use of public and private security cameras in developed nations, viewing violent events has become a mainstay of security and investigative work. It is used in the pursuit of criminal and civil actions and is used to verify events, identify subjects, confirm timelines, and validate verbal testimony.
To process this incredibly useful evidence, the human brain must apply significant amounts of cognitive and affective energy.
The Neuroscience of Surveillance Review
The brain’s ability to process surveillance footage represents a complex interplay between feature detection, pattern recognition, and affective response.
On a purely physical level, our eyes capture light as electrical signals that are processed in the visual cortex. Once received in the visual cortex, feature detection begins, and specialized neurons identify edges, texture, depth, color, and motion. These features are then “bounced” against patterns with which we are familiar through experience or exposure. When viewing surveillance recordings, we typically seek comparisons between what the brain has detected and the specific individuals, places, and behaviors with which we are familiar. Higher-order cognitive processes are overlayed with emotional responses. In most cases, a conscious or subconscious emotional response will occur.
For example, an individual who watches footage of a violent mugging will visually process the details of the event such as attacker, victim, and venue characteristics. Depending upon the individual’s experience, he or she will cognitively focus on specifics such as method of approach, means of attack, and reaction to victim response. A typical affective or emotional response of fear or anger will arise, which can be charged by past experiences witnessing similar events or past personal experience with violence. Each of these factors contributes to the conclusions drawn regarding the mugging.
The Challenges of the Physical, Cognitive, Affective Nexus
The nexus of physical, cognitive, and affective processing of surveillance recordings gives rise to challenges and opportunities for optimizing the use of recordings as a safety proposition in ways that safeguard the wellbeing of security professionals.
Feature fatigue. Maintaining sustained attention is physical and—in the often time-sensitive investigations when surveillance video needs to be reviewed—fatigue can compromise the brain’s ability to accurately process what it seeing, exaggerating more obvious features and missing others. This is particularly true when the same footage is reviewed multiple times, as is often necessary during investigations.
Cognitive overload and bias. Even if physically able to identify the objects, persons, places, and events that are captured by surveillance video, the brain’s incredible efficiency in pattern recognition can become a liability under circumstances that are commonplace during investigations.
Access to multiple surveillance recordings of the same incident—while highly advantageous—can result in cognitive overload. It can cause confirmation bias, during which the brain fits certain visual indicators into a narrative that excludes other saliant stimuli and draws a rational—if inaccurate—conclusion as to what has occurred.
Vulnerability to confirmation bias also results from the security professional’s own expertise, which causes the brain to rapidly process information in a manner that fits what is expected based on past experience. Exposure to recent past similar incidents or “pattern crimes,” for example, can result in the current event being viewed consistently with similar prior ones. This phenomenon results from the brain’s confusion between familiarity and truth: If something is familiar to us, it seems true when in fact it is just easier for the brain to process. (This is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is regularly used by marketers, advertisers, and politicians to influence human behavior.)
Affective reactions. Every stimulus processed by a functionally intact brain will trigger an affective or emotional reaction. The intense material to which security professionals are often subject generally activates the amygdala—the section of the brain that determines if the signal it receives requires us to protect our survival (typically by flight, fight, freeze, or fawn responses). Ideally, our frontal cortex allows us to manage our response to the amygdala’s reaction in a manner that maintains safety, personal well-being, and balance. All too often, however, the ability to respond to the amygdala’s activation is overcome by fatigue, overexposure to traumatic material, and misguided attempts to “de-sensitize” ourselves to acts of human brutality that are morally injurious.
Affective reactions have recently posed a two-fold challenge for security professionals: First, there is the personal overexposure to widely available private and public security footage that can lead to burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma—each of which changes one’s world view and shatters the original connection to meaning and purpose related to working in the security field. Second, affective reactions have been increasingly weaponized through the use of real or deepfake security footage designed to emotionally dysregulate targets and mobilize engagement in looting, vandalism, and even violence.
The Opportunities in the Physical, Cognitive, Affective Nexus
Although repeated exposure to disturbing surveillance footage can produce negative consequences for operators, these effects are not unavoidable. However, interventions require intent and dedication.
Physical fitness. Some organizations erroneously associate activity with productivity, but taking breaks at regular intervals is essential. Research indicates that taking a break—walking away, resting the eyes on something beyond a computer screen, grabbing water—for five minutes for every 25 to 30 minutes of viewing maintains optimal concentration and minimizes fatigue.
Cognitive balance and debiased conclusions. Maintaining cognitive balance and arriving at debiased conclusions are most easily facilitated by diversity of thought. Ideally, this comes in the form of reviewing the same footage as a partner, then comparing perceptions and conclusions. When resources do not allow the allocation of multiple individuals to the same reviews, playing devil’s advocate to one’s own conclusions can help undermine the introduction of erroneous, premature, or biased determinations through the honest consideration of alternative narratives.
Affective ownership. Many of us were trained to control our reactions—particularly fear and anger—by ignoring them and going directly to higher-order, rational thinking about a particular situation. This not only deprives us of a potentially richer understanding of the reality before us, it also doesn’t work. Ignoring a neuronic process does not stop it from influencing our experience, whether consciously or subconsciously. Our attempts to ignore affective reactions can result in a repression of emotion, which we could inappropriately unleash on others later.
Ignoring our affective response also places us at risk for experiencing burnout, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and depression and suicidality. Emotional responses to traumatic material are normal warnings that we are bearing witness to something dangerous. They also provide a barometer for when we need to take a break. Instead of ignoring these signals, we can harness them to maintain long-term wellness and balance.
These same principles apply when subjects have been hijacked by affective reactions, as is happening with increased frequency through the weaponization of social media. Agitators who wish to mobilize groups to disruptive action (in contrast to civil unrest) purposefully flood social media channels with grotesque or terrifying images and lean on the dynamic of emotional contagion—where powerful emotions felt in groups reinforce the shared state of fear and rage—overriding higher-order thinking and resulting in emotional dysregulation. Behaviors—which are a form of communication—become as unpredictable and uncontrolled as the emotions they are expressing.
Just as on the personal level, these affective responses are most effectively managed through acknowledging that these behaviors are normal reactions to abhorrent stimuli. Once an acknowledgement of this dynamic is received and felt, higher-order thinking will no longer be drowned by the primitive signals of survival, and the work of constructively dealing with the true, complex social issues can begin.
Diana Concannon, PsyD, PCI, CTM, is a forensic psychologist with more than two decades’ experience conducting violence risk assessments, threat assessment and management, and crisis interventions in myriad contexts. She is dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant International University and principal at CPW Consulting Group Inc., which recently acquired Specialized Training Services, the publisher of the WAVR-21 workplace and campus violence threat assessment protocol.
