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A FIELD STUDY ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DESCRIPTION ACCURACY AND IDENTIFICATION ACCURACY

A field experiment was conducted to assess the relationship between description accuracy and identification accuracy. Forty-seven female bank and savings and loan association tellers interacted with an experimental confederate who attempted to cash an altered United States Post Office money order. Several hours later the tellers were asked to describe him, estimate the duration of their interaction with him, and identify him from a photograph lineup which did or did not include his picture. In addition, tellers were given accurate, neutral, or inaccurate postevent information concerning the target person's appearance. The effect of the postevent information on tellers' descriptions and identifications was not significant; tellers in each of the three conditions performed equally well. In contrast to a guideline set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court for the evaluation of eyewitness evidence, there was no relationship between description accuracy and identification accuracy. These results were interpreted in terms of encoding specificity theory and generalized to crime situations involving eyewitnesses. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-09, Section: B, page: 3118. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75425
ContributorsWOLFSKEIL, MELISSA PIGOTT., Florida State University
Source SetsFlorida State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText
Format63 p.
RightsOn campus use only.
RelationDissertation Abstracts International

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