47 research outputs found
Are children less reliable at making visual identifications than adults? A review
Get PDFThe current paper reviews research that has investigated developmental differences in lineup identification. A wealth of studies have shown that children can be as accurate as adults when making a correct identification from a target present lineup (TP), however children are more inclined to choose and thereby make a false identification from a target absent (TA) lineup, as compared to adults. The literature reviewed, suggests that the disparity between children’s and adult’s performances on TA lineups is due to children being unable to resist the social demands to choose someone from a lineup and/or the need to give a positive response. Employing a silhouette within a lineup, that can be chosen if the target is not recognised, appears to be the most successful technique for reducing false identifications made by child witnesses. Including a silhouette as a part of a lineup, along with the lineup administrator being attired in casual clothing, rather than a uniform, are two simple measures that could make child witness identification evidence more reliable
Eye movement strategies during face matching
Get PDFAlthough there is a large literature on face recognition, less is known about the process of face matching, i.e., deciding whether two photographs depict the same person. The research described here examines viewers’ strategies for matching faces, and addresses the issue of which parts of a face are important for this task.
Consistent with previous research, several eye-tracking experiments demonstrated a bias to the eye region when looking at faces. In some studies, there was a scanning strategy whereby only one eye on each face was viewed (the left eye on the right face and the right eye on the left face). However, viewing patterns and matching performance could be influenced by manipulating the way the face pair was presented: through face inversion, changing the distance between the two faces and varying the layout.
There was a strong bias to look at the face on the left first, and then to look at the face on the right. A left visual field bias for individual faces has been found in a number of previous studies, but this is the first time it has been reported using pairs of faces in a matching task. The bias to look first at the item on the left was also found when trying to match pairs of similar line drawings of objects and therefore is not specific to face stimuli.
Finally, the experiments in this thesis suggest that the way face pairs are presented can influence viewers’ accuracy on a matching task, as well as the way in which these faces are viewed. This suggests that the layout of face pairs for matching might be important in real world settings, such as the attempt to identify criminals from security cameras
The Mystery Man can help reduce false identifications for child witnesses:evidence from video lineups
Get PDFIt is well established that children (as young as 5 years) can correctly identify a target from a target present (TP) line-up as accurately as adults; however, when shown a target absent (TA) line-up, children make more false identifications. In the present study, children aged 5–7 and 8–11 years viewed a film of a staged theft, then 1–2 days later were shown either a TP or TA video line-up. Half of the witnesses viewed line-ups that included a ‘mystery man’ (a black silhouette with a white question mark), which they could select if they did not recognise anyone from the line-up. When the ‘mystery man’ was present in the line-up, there were significantly fewer false identifications for the TA line-ups. This study shows that including a silhouette in a video line-up can help reduce false identifications for children as young as 5 years of age, without reducing correct identifications
Effects of Changes in Background Colour on the Identification of Own- and Other-Race Faces
Get PDFThe current study investigated whether small differences in the background colours between the lineup members would influence identification accuracy of own-race and other-race faces. Using the well-established 1 in 10 paradigm, half of the array faces had exactly the same backgrounds and half were on backgrounds of slightly different hues of green. For TP arrays, participants were more accurate at identifying own-race faces, as compared to the other-race faces when all backgrounds were the same. However, when backgrounds had slightly different hues, there was no difference in how accurate people were at identifying faces from both races. For TA arrays, participants were more likely to incorrectly choose a face if the backgrounds were not all the same, regardless of the race of faces. Real world implications from these findings are that using lineups where the backgrounds are slightly different hues may increase the likelihood of the false identification of innocent suspects
The own-race bias in child and adolescent witnesses: Evidence from video line-ups
Get PDFThis study investigated the own-race bias in British school children using an eyewitness paradigm. Some 319 participants viewed films of two similar staged thefts, one that depicted a Caucasian culprit and the other an Asian culprit, and then after a delay of 2–3 days, viewed a line-up for each culprit. One hundred and seventy-six of the participants were Caucasian and 143 were Asian. There were also two age groups: 164 were aged 7–9 years and 152 were 12–14 years. There was a significant own-race bias for Caucasian participants from both age groups that resulted in more correct identifications for the own-race culprit from target present line-ups and more false identifications for the target absent line-ups. Asian participants from both age groups showed no own-race bias and performed equally accurately for culprits of both races. Measures of inter-racial contact were associated with correct responses for other-race targets and revealed that the majority of Caucasian participants in the current sample had very little contact with Asians, whereas the majority of Asian participants had high levels of contact with Caucasians
Eyewitness identification procedures: Do researchers and practitioners share the same goals?
Get PDFResearch has undoubtedly led to a number of important changes to the way police obtain eyewitness identification evidence in a number of countries. However, despite these successes and the significant effort made by researchers to communicate key findings to public agencies, policy-makers and influential law enforcement personnel using a broad range of evidence, relevant policy and practice have either been very slow to respond or have not changed to incorporate the suggestions at all. In this article we employed an online survey to explore the knowledge and opinions of front-line policing practitioners in the UK regarding eyewitness research and practice. This was undertaken to determine how familiar less-senior, operational staff were with key research findings, what their opinions of current practice were and crucially, their views on how identification procedures should be improved compared with the recommendations made by researchers. The results revealed a fundamental mismatch between research and practice, with practitioners indicating a need to increase the rate of positive identifications and research tending to focus on methods of reducing false identifications. This result suggests that an approach driven by the need for the police to produce convictions may be an important factor that is blocking the translation of eyewitness identification research into practice
Digital detectives: websleuthing reduces eyewitness identification accuracy in police lineups
Get PDFEyewitnesses to crimes sometimes search for a culprit on social media before viewing a police lineup, but it is not known whether this affects subsequent lineup identification accuracy. The present online study was conducted to address this. 285 participants viewed a mock crime video, and after a 15-20 minute delay either (i) viewed a mock social media site including the culprit, (ii) viewed a mock social media site including a lookalike, or (iii) completed a filler task. A week later, participants made an identification from a photo lineup display. It was predicted that searching for a culprit on social media containing the lookalike (rather than the culprit) would reduce lineup identification accuracy. There was a significant association between social media exposure and lineup accuracy for the Target Present lineup (30% more of them failed to positively identify the culprit than participants in the other conditions), but for the Target Absent lineup there was no significant association with lineup identification accuracy. The results suggest that if an eyewitness sees a lookalike (where they are expecting to see the culprit) when conducting a self-directed search on social media, they are less likely to subsequently identify the culprit in the formal ID procedure
Selfish learning: The impact of self-referential encoding on children's literacy attainment
Get PDFSelf-referencing (i.e., thinking about oneself during encoding) can increase attention toward to-be-encoded material, and support memory for information in adults and children. The current inquiry tested an educational application of this ‘self reference effect’ (SRE) on memory. A self-referential modification of literacy tasks (vocabulary spelling) was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, seven-to nine-year-old children (N = 47) were asked to learn the spelling of four nonsense words by copying the vocabulary and generating sentences. Half of the children were asked to include themselves as a subject in each sentence. Results showed that children in this self-referent condition produced longer sentences and increased spelling accuracy by more than 20%, relative to those in an other-referent condition. Experiment 2 (N = 32) replicated this pattern in real-word learning. These findings demonstrate the significant potential advantages of utilizing self-referential encoding in the classroom
Improving line-up identifications using the mystery man procedure
No full textA wealth of research has investigated how good people are at being eyewitnesses. This involves investigating how accurate witnesses are at correctly identifying a previously seen culprit from a line-up, and also whether witnesses choose someone from a line-up, even if the culprit is not there. Many of these studies have found that children and adults over the age of 60, are more likely to make false identifications when shown a line-up that does not contain a culprit. To reduce false identifications a new technique called the Mystery Man procedure was developed, which involves placing a silhouette in the line-up. The two studies discussed here, found that using the mystery man procedure can significantly reduce false identifications, without reducing correct identifications, for both children and older adults. The results of this research suggest that this technique could easily be implemented in police line-ups to make eyewitness identifications more accurate
