Increasing the Evidential Information of Eyewitness Lineups: A Comparison of Two Lineup Procedures

Presenter

Jiameng Chen

Campus

UMass Amherst

Sponsor

Andrew Cohen, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UMass Amherst

Schedule

Session 5, 3:30 PM - 4:15 PM [Schedule by Time][Poster Grid for Time/Location]

Location

Poster Board A73, Campus Center Auditorium, Row 4 (A61-A80) [Poster Location Map]

Abstract

The general objective of this project is to compare two eyewitness lineup procedures on their capacity to provide information about the guilt or innocence of the suspect. A recent finding shows that eyewitnesses may not respond directly to the suspect when identifying a filler known as innocent or rejecting the lineup, greatly reducing the amount of information gained about whether the suspect is guilty or innocent. Thus, we will compare two lineup procedures that require the witness to respond to the suspect to help offset this information loss and find the better one. Eyewitnesses in the first procedure, the rule-out procedure, will be asked to respond to all lineup members by rating confidence, which could problematically have interference and dependencies in the responses. To avoid such issues, we introduce a new lineup procedure called the simultaneous+ procedure, designed to be both natural for the eyewitness and reduce the problems inherent in the rule-out procedure. It will require eyewitnesses to provide their first and second responses only. We hypothesize that the simultaneous+ procedure will have the same effectiveness as the rule-out procedure but in a less invasive and interfering way. In practice, we hope to develop a better eyewitness identification procedure for the legal system, which may help mitigate the rate of false convictions and bring justice.

Keywords

Eyewitness memory, Lineup procedure, Eyewitness identification, Expected information gain

Research Area

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences

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