The effects of allowing a second sequential lineup lap on choosing and probative value.

When presented with a sequential lineup, witnesses see each member of the lineup individually, essentially making a yes/no decision for each person shown. An important policy question is whether witnesses should be allowed to see an additional lap of a sequential lineup. We investigated the impact of a second lap on eyewitness decision-making and on the probative value of suspect identifications. We recruited a large community sample of participants (N = 393), each of whom viewed a target person before seeing a sequential lineup that did or did not include the target. A second lap was either required or optional. The group of participants who accepted the second lap were less able to discriminate between the target and the fillers and responded more conservatively in lap 1 than the group of witnesses who declined the second lap. Responding became more lenient from lap 1 to lap 2. Of the participants who saw a second lap, roughly 40% changed their response, most frequently from a non-identification to an identification. Both culprit identifications and filler identifications increased from lap 1 to lap 2. The probative value of suspect identifications was not significantly different whether witnesses were allowed two laps or one. However, the observed effects may be moderated by a number of system and estimator variables. Further, even small changes in probative value can have very different consequences depending upon the target-absent base rate

Placing faces: recollection and familiarity in the own-race bias for face recognition

The research presented in this thesis examined the roles of recollection and familiarity in the own-race bias (ORB) in recognition memory for faces. In Paper 1, Jacoby’s (1991) process-dissociation procedure was used to estimate the relative contributions of recollection and familiarity in recognizing own- and other-race faces. Recollection estimates were higher for own-race faces than for other-race faces, although this effect disappeared when deep or shallow encoding strategies were encouraged. In Paper 2, participants were shown to be less accurate at ignoring previously seen other-race distractors than own-race distractors. Papers 3 and 4 examined how accurately participants were able to remember contextual information about correctly recognized faces. In the encoding phase of an old/new recognition test, each target face was paired with one of several different backgrounds. At testing, old judgments were followed by context judgments, in which the participant attempted to identify with which background the face had been paired. The context judgments were consistently more accurate for correctly recognized own-race faces than for correctly recognized other-race faces. This effect was robust to experimental manipulations such as context reinstatement and divided attention. The overall conclusion from this thesis is that recollection is inferior for other-race faces compared to own-race faces. This recollection deficit means that it is more difficult to retrieve specific information about the circumstances in which other-race faces were encountered. The implications of this recollection deficit for real world behaviour are discussed, with particular reference to eyewitness memory

“Only your first yes will count”: The impact of prelineup instructions on sequential lineup decisions.

When administering sequential lineups, researchers often inform their participants that only their first yes response will count. This instruction differs from the original sequential lineup protocol and from how sequential lineups are conducted in practice. Participants (N = 896) viewed a videotaped mock crime and viewed a simultaneous lineup, a sequential lineup with a first-yes-counts instruction, or a sequential control lineup (with no first-yes-counts instruction); the lineup was either target-present or target-absent. Participants in the first-yes-counts condition were less likely to identify the suspect and more likely to reject the lineup than participants in the simultaneous and sequential control conditions, suggesting a conservative criterion shift. The diagnostic value of suspect identifications, as measured by partial Area Under the Curve, was lower in the first-yes-counts lineup than in the simultaneous lineup. Results were qualitatively similar for other metrics of diagnosticity, though the differences were not statistically significant. Differences between the simultaneous and sequential control lineups were negligible on all outcomes. The first-yes-counts instruction undermines sequential lineup performance and produces an artefactual simultaneous lineup advantage. Researchers should adhere to sequential lineup protocols that maximize diagnosticity and that would feasibly be implemented in practice, allowing them to draw more generalizable conclusions from their data

Are portrait artists superior face recognizers? Limited impact of adult experience on face recognition ability.

Across two studies, we asked whether extensive experience in portrait art is associated with face recognition ability. In Study 1, 64 students completed a standardized face recognition test before and after completing a year-long art course that included substantial portraiture training. We found no evidence of an improvement in face recognition after training over and above what would be expected by practice alone. In Study 2, we investigated the possibility that more extensive experience might be needed for such advantages to emerge, by testing a cohort of expert portrait artists (N = 28), all of whom had many years of experience. In addition to memory for faces, we also explored memory for abstract art and for words in a paired-associate recognition test. The expert portrait artists performed similarly to a large, normative comparison sample on memory for faces and words, but showed a small advantage for abstract art. Taken together, our results converge with existing literature to suggest that there is relatively little plasticity in face recognition in adulthood, at which point our substantial everyday experience with faces may have pushed us to the limits of our capabilities

The other race effect in perception and recognition: Insights from the complete composite task

This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.People are more accurate at recognizing faces of their own race than faces from other races, a phenomenon known as the other-race effect. Other-race effects have also been reported in some perceptual tasks. Across 3 experiments, White and Chinese participants completed recognition tests as well as the complete paradigm of the composite task, which measures participants’ abilities to selectively attend to the target region of a face while ignoring the task-irrelevant region of the face. Each task was completed with both own- and other-race faces. At a group level, participants showed significant own-race effects in recognition, but not in the composite task. At an individual difference level, the results provided no support for the hypothesis that a deficit in holistic processing for other-race faces drives the other-race effect in recognition. We therefore conclude that the other-race effect in recognition is not driven by the processes that underpin the composite effect.Australian Research Counci