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Scholarly Works (6 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2023)
    Creative Commons 'BY-ND' version 4.0 license
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 44 (2022)
    Though high-confidence identifications from a police lineup can provide strong evidence of guilt, confidence in a lineup rejection often provides little additional information beyond the rejection itself. Here, we investigate whether participants use different decision rules for positive identifications vs. lineup rejections. In this experiment, we compared confidence ratings from a standard simultaneous lineup (where confidence in the lineup rejection is not applied to any particular face) to the confidence ratings from a rate-them-all simultaneous lineup (where confidence that a person is or is not the perpetrator is applied to every face in the lineup). We hypothesize that, in the case of a lineup rejection, confidence in the standard condition will be best predicted by the average memory signal in the rate-them-all condition. The possible reliance on an average memory signal could help to explain why previous research has not found a strong confidence-accuracy relationship for lineup rejections.
      Cover page: Decision Variables in the Case of Police Lineup RejectionsCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2024)
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2022)
          Creative Commons 'BY-ND' version 4.0 license
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2022)

          Objective

          Recent work has established that high-confidence identifications (IDs) from a police lineup can provide compelling evidence of guilt. By contrast, when a witness rejects the lineup, it may offer only limited evidence of innocence. Moreover, confidence in a lineup rejection often provides little additional information beyond the rejection itself. Thus, although lineups are useful for incriminating the guilty, they are less useful for clearing the innocent of suspicion. Here, we test predictions from a signal-detection-based model of eyewitness ID to create a lineup that is capable of increasing information about innocence.

          Hypotheses

          Our model-based simulations suggest that high-confidence rejections should exonerate many more innocent suspects and do so with higher accuracy if, after a witness rejects a lineup but before they report their confidence, they are shown the suspect and asked, "How sure are you that this person is not the perpetrator?"

          Method

          Participants (N = 3,346) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk watched a 30-s mock-crime video of a perpetrator. Afterward, they were randomly assigned to lineup procedures using a 2 (standard control vs. reveal condition) × 2 (target present vs. target absent) design. A standard simultaneous lineup served as the control condition. The reveal condition was identical to the control condition except in cases of lineup rejection: When a lineup rejection occurred, the suspect appeared on the screen, and participants provided a confidence rating indicating their belief that the suspect was not the perpetrator.

          Results

          The reveal procedure increased both the accuracy and frequency of high-confidence rejections relative to the standard simultaneous lineup.

          Conclusions

          Collecting a confidence rating about the suspect after a lineup is rejected may make it possible to quickly clear innocent suspects of suspicion and reduce the amount of contact that innocent people have with the legal system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
            Cover page: The Reveal Procedure: A Way to Enhance Evidence of Innocence From Police LineupsCreative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 4.0 license
            • Article
            UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2023)

            Eyewitness misidentifications have contributed to many wrongful convictions. However, despite expressing high confidence at trial, eyewitnesses often make inconclusive misidentifications on the first test conducted early in a police investigation. According to a new scientific consensus, it is important to focus on the results of the first test because, if the perpetrator is not in the lineup, the test itself leaves a memory trace of the innocent suspect in the witness’s brain. Thus, all subsequent tests of the witness’s memory for the same suspect constitute tests of contaminated memory. Unfortunately, when evidence of an initial inconclusive identification is introduced at trial, the rules of evidence provide a witness with an opportunity to explain their prior inconsistent statement. In response, witnesses often provide an opinion about why they did not confidently identify the suspect on the initial test despite doing so now (e.g., “I was nervous on the first test”).However, witnesses lack expertise in—and have no awareness of—the subconscious mechanisms of memory contamination that have been elucidated by decades of scientific research. The combination of a sincerely held (false) memory and a believable (but erroneous) explanation for a prior inconsistent statement is often persuasive to jurors. This is a recipe for a wrongful conviction, one that has been followed many times. The Federal Rules of Evidence were enacted almost a half-century ago, and it maybe time to revisit them in light of the principles of memory that have been established since that time.

              Creative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 4.0 license
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