Are witnesses who are accurate at identifying a suspect?s face in a lineup consistently accurate at identifying suspects or in saying what happened during a crime? Given that erroneous eyewitness testimony contributes to wrongful convictions and that jurors give great weight to eyewitness testimony, knowing whether witness accuracy is stable would be helpful. Traditional eyewitness research does not answer these questions, as most studies examine eyewitness memory for only a single witnessed event. Thus, this project seeks to investigate: (1) the stability of witness memory performance, both within and across witness tasks (e.g., lineups, witness reports of criminal events, and resistance to misinformation) and (2) the strength of a number of individual difference variables, including personality and cognitive traits, in predicting eyewitness performance.
The project will examine the stability of witness accuracy both within and across witness accuracy tasks (lineup identification accuracy; accurate memory of the events; and resistance to misleading post-event information about the events) for five brief witnessed events across multiple study sessions. The use of repeated witness tasks for five separate witness events will permit a more sensitive, more generalizable measure of witness accuracy than in prior research.
The stability of witness accuracy has important broader impacts for decision makers (e.g., jurors, prosecutors, police officers, etc.) in the criminal justice system in evaluating the probable accuracy of witness statements or conflicting statements of different witnesses, given that real world witnesses need to be accurate in both their identifications and their event reports regarding a crime. Further, the proposed procedure may provide a new paradigm for investigating witness accuracy. The project will also support the training of a graduate student and expose undergraduate research assistants to the research process.
