This study investigated the influence of an authority figure on an eyewitness identification task. Subjects watched a staged crime and then were administered a photo lineup by either an authority or non-authority figure. Subjects who were administered a lineup by an authority figure were significantly more likely to choose someone from the lineup than subjects who were shown a lineup by a non-authority figure. Similarly, subjects who were given biased instructions were significantly more likely to choose someone from the lineup than subjects who were given unbiased instructions. These effect obtained whether the target was present or absent from the lineup. These data suggest that one way to minimize suggestibility of eyewitnesses is to replace the uniformed officer with a neutral individual. Alternatively, the effect of a police officer on a witness' choosing behavior may be eliminated by providing the witness with unbiased instructions.

Eyewitnesses to crimes sometimes perform cognitively demanding tasks while simultaneously observing a perpetrator. This division of attentional resources can cause them to remember the perpetrator less accurately. Pickel et al. (in press) showed that judging a target individual’s veracity impairs subsequent memory for his or her appearance and message. They argued that this result occurred because judging veracity is an attention-demanding task that is difficult to perform while simultaneously encoding the target’s information. The previous study also demonstrated that suspicion exaggerated the memory impairment effect, apparently by inducing suspicious witnesses to scrutinize the target more closely than non-suspicious witnesses. The goal of the present study was to replicate the findings that judging veracity impairs witnesses’ memory for the target’s appearance and message using a different video (i.e., a different target, crime scenario, and message) and that induced suspicion exaggerates this effect. In addition, I hypothesized that judging veracity also impairs witnesses’ performance on a lineup task and inflates confidence and ratings on other testimony-relevant judgments by giving witnesses the false sense that they have attended closely to the suspect’s physical appearance and message. I hypothesize that suspicion will exaggerate this effect. Results were found to be consistent with Pickel et al.’s (in press) previous findings. Witnesses who judged veracity performed more poorly on the lineup task than those who were not informed they would need to judge veracity, and witnesses who were made suspicious performed worse than those who judged veracity. Differences were discovered across the groups in relation to certainty ratings and other testimony-relevant judgments about the eyewitness experience. / Department of Psychological Science

This study was designed to test for the effect of role of presenter during a showup (one-person lineup) and eyewitnesses' authoritarianism on identification rates. Specifically, this study addressed the question of whether or not eyewitnesses are more likely to identify a suspect as the perpetrator of a crime when they make their identifications to a police officer rather than a civilian, and whether authoritarianism interacts with presenter role. 169 participants witnessed a staged theft and were then asked to make an identification of a suspect in a showup. Interpretation of the results suggested that the presence of a police officer during a showup increases identification rates of the suspect. Also, a higher level of authoritarianism in the eyewitness and the presence of a police officer increase the confidence eyewitnesses have in their identification. Implications for law enforcement and future research are discussed. Acknowledgements: Special thanks to David Taylor, Emily Zumbaugh, KimberlyBolich, and Christina Waddups for their assistance with data collection. / Department of Psychological Science

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-83).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. John C. Brigham, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Psychology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 12, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wyoming, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Dec. 1, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-43).

Misleading post-event information--Cognitive processing differences.

Psychologists, legal practitioners and scholars share the knowledge that honest eyewitnesses can err in their attempts to identify the perpetrator of a crime. This thesis reports an experimental investigation of the extent to which expert evidence and judicial instruction can improve juror ability to discriminate between accurate and inaccurate identifications. Special attention is also paid to the logic of inferences which have been made by psychologists regarding the efficacy of expert evidence, and compares methodologies adopting direct measures of participant Sensitivity to Eyewitness Accuracy (SEA) with those that can only indirectly assess this construct. Study 1 surveys the knowledge and opinions of legal professionals regarding eyewitness identification issues (n = 35), showing that respondents expressed doubts that judicial instructions would exert an effect equivalent to that of eyewitness expert evidence. Accordingly, Experiments 1 to 4 (Experiment 1, n = 104; Experiment 2, n = 238; Experiment 3, n = 228; Experiment 4, n = 297) were conducted to directly assess the relative impacts of judicial instruction and expert evidence on participant juror SEA. The methodology utilised in these investigations incorporated the testimony of real eyewitnesses to a staged crime scenario in order to assess the impact of instruction on juror ability to discriminate between known accurate and known inaccurate eyewitnesses. Overall, little evidence was found to support the notion that expert evidence is more effective than judicial instruction, as no significant association was identified between instruction type and SEA. This result was found to hold irrespective of the objective quality of the expert?s testimony (accurate or erroneous). In light of the results from Experiments 1 to 4, Experiment 5 was designed to investigate why the experts were not able to improve the discrimination accuracy of the jurors. This study focused on the extent to which participants of varying levels of expertise could correctly classify eyewitness accuracy. The results of Experiment 5 (n = 145) suggest that experts were no better able to discriminate between accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses than novice laypeople. Overall, the evidence reported in this thesis raises serious questions regarding the utility of eyewitness expertise in the completion of eyewitness discrimination tasks.