An investigation was conducted to test two aspects of eyewitness identification. Sex differences in eyewitness reliability and an explanation of the weapon focus effect based on object salience were tested. One hundred ninety-one male and female American college students viewed a slide sequence depicting a male or female target person enacting a simple behavioral progression while holding various objects (a gun, several unusual objects and a magazine as a control). Afterwards, they attempted to identify the target person in a photospread and recall physical details about the individual on a questionnaire. Results confirmed a predicted own-sex identification bias effect (p < .001), but did not support the object salience hypothesis. Instead, an interaction between subject sex and object was obtained indicating that men and women attended to and were distracted by different kinds of objects (p < .009)