This set of studies used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the electrophysiology of face recognition as it may occur in real-life circumstances including eyewitness identification. Research using photographs has identified two ERP components as being associated with memory function, the N250 (an early indicator of perceptual recognition) and the P300 (associated with stimulus evaluation, task-relevance, and probability), however, there is no published research examining the relationship between these components and memory for live events, and recognizing a face seen briefly in real-life is somewhat different than recognizing a face only seen in a photograph. The present set of three studies employed a “target / non-target” paradigm that used a live interaction at each encoding stage. In Experiment 1, participants were introduced to and asked to identify their study experimenter as the target. In the second experiment, participants were introduced to the same experimenter and asked to imagine that they witnessed her committing a convenience-store robbery. Participants were asked to “cover” for the experimenter by choosing a different photo from the line-up to accuse as the culprit – they are asked to lie. In Experiment 3, participants witnessed a live simulated theft and were asked to identify the culprit from a line-up. In all three experiments the line-up paradigm was identical – participants were shown a repeated series of sequentially-presented photographs and were asked to correctly identify one target among nine foils (non-targets), while brainwaves were recorded. Results showed that across all three studies, both the N250 and P300 were attenuated for the person selected as the target, in comparison to correct rejections of foils. Additional results from Experiment 2 showed that, compared to rejections of foils, both the N250 and P300 were enhanced for rejections of the experimenter-photo when participants were “covering” for her. In Experiment 3, participants who were unable to correctly identify the culprit showed that the N250 to incorrect rejections of the culprit was larger than correct rejections of foils. Finally, a comparison of participants who correctly identified the culprit and those who incorrectly identified a foil showed that the amplitude of the N250 and P300 to the selected culprit were equivalent regardless of eyewitness accuracy. Collectively, results from Experiments 1, 2 and 3 provide support that the memory effects indicated by the N250 and P300 components reported in laboratory studies generalize to person memories acquired during live interactions.

When conducting initial forensic interviews, facilitating later retrieval in an efficient and timely manner is often important. A tool called The Self-Administered Interview (SAI) has been shown to facilitate later retrieval when completed initially. Even if less time-consuming than other interviewing protocols, it still takes considerable time to complete. This study compared the capability to facilitate later retrieval and temporal aspects of SAI and its separate parts to investigate the relative worth of each part. The two separate parts were a written, free recall and the rest of SAI without the free recall. Forty-five participants completed either of the parts after watching a fictious crime. Six days later a memory test was administered. This study used the same research design as two previous studies which allowed for integrated analysis using data from the three studies. SAI facilitated later retrieval by significantly increasing number of correct answers and decreasing number of incorrect answers. SAI without a free recall significantly decreased number of incorrect answers. SAI took approximately twice as long to complete as a written, free recall. SAI without free recall had comparable results as a free recall but took almost the same time to complete as SAI. An overall pattern for all initial actions was that an increase in complexity and comprehensive design, increased performance but also took longer to complete. If performance is priority and time is not a factor, SAI is recommended. If lowering time of completion is priority a free recall is the quickest action.

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Prior work has demonstrated that the sequential presentation of lineup members in eyewitness lineups can result in undesirable position effects. For example, some studies have shown that placing the suspect in later positions increases discriminability. However, the evidence for this late-position discriminability advantage is mixed and the processes by which the discriminability increase occurs are unclear. However, one theory in particular, diagnostic feature detection theory (DFDT) explicitly predicts a late-position discriminability increase. According to DFDT, because shared features across lineup members cannot be used as reliable recognition cues to guide identification, discounting these features from consideration improves recognition. In sequential lineups, when the suspect is in a later position, witnesses are exposed to more of these shared features and are expected to benefit from discounting. By contrast, when the suspect is in an earlier position, witnesses are exposed to fewer shared features, and hence do not have the same advantage under the assumptions of the DFDT framework. One reason for the mixed evidence across the literature might be due to variation in suspect-filler similarity relationship between lineup members across studies, which we expected would moderate late-position memory effects. With the above in mind, the primary goals of the present work were: (1) testing for position effects at different levels of suspect-filler (SF) similarity, which might help elucidate conflicting evidence from prior work, and (2) testing DFDT mechanisms by simultaneously manipulating both innocent-suspect-perpetrator (IS-P) similarity and SF similarity. We found no evidence for late-position increases in discriminability as predicted by DFDT; however, participants were more conservative in later positions, especially when SF similarity was low. Discriminability was most strongly influenced by IS-P similarity, and was maximized when both SF and IS-P similarity was low. Implications for theories of eyewitness memory, practical implications for policy recommendations, and future directions are discussed.

No description available.