These findings suggest that we should measure the degree of familiarity that an eyewitness has gained with a target to better assess their identification accuracy and indicate that this could be achieved at an individual level with multiple lineups of faces. Across three experiments, we find that only a minority of observers can act on a target consistently. We argue that an observer’s ability to identify a target person repeatedly should increase our confidence that an accurate eyewitness identification has been made by this individual. We therefore tested the ability of observers to identify an unfamiliar person repeatedly in an eyewitness paradigm to determine the extent to which this is possible. However, such theories are based on the recognition of familiar people, who are well-known to an observer, rather than the recognition of unfamiliar people, which typically gives rise to error in eyewitness scenarios. Whereas eyewitnesses typically attempt to identify a perpetrator once, theories of face recognition in cognitive psychology stipulate that accurate identification is characterized by the ability to recognize the same face repeatedly. In criminal investigations, the difficulty therefore arises in differentiating accurate from inaccurate eyewitnesses. Many eyewitnesses make perfectly accurate identifications, but many are also prone to error. In turn, these findings suggest that consistency of responses across multiple lineups of faces could be applied to assess which individuals are accurate eyewitnesses.Įyewitness identifications are crucial for police investigations to determine the perpetrators of crime. This indicates that most observers have limited facial representations of target persons in eyewitness scenarios, which do not allow for robust identification in most individuals, partly due to limitations in their ability to recognize unfamiliar faces. The ability to do so correlates with individual differences in identification accuracy on two established tests of unfamiliar face recognition (Experiment 3). Such repeat identifications are challenging and can be performed only by a proportion of individuals, both when a target exhibits limited and more substantial variability in appearance across lineups (Experiments 1 and 2). In this study, we apply this reasoning to eyewitness identification by assessing the recognition of the same target person repeatedly, over six successive lineups. Theories of face recognition in cognitive psychology stipulate that the hallmark of accurate identification is the ability to recognize a person consistently, across different encounters.
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