The Kenyan Survivors of Sexual Violence Network: Preserving Memory Evidence with a Bespoke Mobile Application to Increase Access to Vital Services and Justice

Police interviews gather detailed information from witnesses about the perpetrator that is crucial for solving crimes. Research has established that interviewing witnesses immediately after the crime maintains memory accuracy over time. However, in some contexts, such as in conflict settings and low-income countries, witness interviews occur after long delays, which decreases survivors’ access to vital services and justice. We investigated whether an immediate interview via a mobile phone application (SV_CaseStudy Mobile Application, hereafter MobApp) developed by the Kenyan Survivors of Sexual Violence Network preserves people’s memory accuracy over time. Participants (N = 90) viewed a mock burglary and were then interviewed either immediately using MobApp or MobApp+ (which included additional questions about the offender’s behaviour) and again one week later (n = 60), or solely after a one-week delay (n = 30). We found that memory accuracy one week later was higher for participants immediately interviewed with MobApp or MobApp+ compared to those interviewed solely after a one-week delay. Additionally, memory accuracy was maintained for those interviewed with the mobile application across the one-week period. These findings indicate that the mobile phone application is promising for preserving memory accuracy in contexts where crimes are reported to the police after a delay

Receiver operating characteristic analysis of eyewitness memory: Comparing the diagnostic accuracy of simultaneous versus sequential lineups

This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.A police lineup presents a real-world signal-detection problem because there are two possible states of the world (the suspect is either innocent or guilty), some degree of information about the true state of the world is available (the eyewitness has some degree of memory for the perpetrator), and a decision is made (identifying the suspect or not). A similar state of affairs applies to diagnostic tests in medicine because, in a patient, the disease is either present or absent, a diagnostic test yields some degree of information about the true state of affairs, and a decision is made about the presence or absence of the disease. In medicine, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis is the standard method for assessing diagnostic accuracy. By contrast, in the eyewitness memory literature, this powerful technique has never been used. Instead, researchers have attempted to assess the diagnostic performance of different lineup procedures using methods that cannot identify the better procedure (e.g., by computing a diagnosticity ratio). Here, we describe the basics of ROC analysis, explaining why it is needed and showing how to use it to measure the performance of different lineup procedures. To illustrate the unique advantages of this technique, we also report three ROC experiments that were designed to investigate the diagnostic accuracy of simultaneous vs. sequential lineups. According to our findings, the sequential procedure appears to be inferior to the simultaneous procedure in discriminating between the presence vs. absence of a guilty suspect in a lineup

To which world regions does the valence–dominance model of social perception apply?

Abstract: Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov’s methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov’s original analysis strategy, the valence–dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions, we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence–dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods and correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution. Protocol registration: The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 5 November 2018. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7611443.v1. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited