Eyewitness Errors:

Ready for the Psychologists: Learning from Eyewitness Errors

Eyewitness Identification

Eyewitness identifications play an important role in many police investigations and courtroom decisions. Identification decision accuracy is shaped not only by the quality of a witness’s memory but also by social-influence variables. Some variables can be categorized as general impairments, whereas others produce biases against a specific suspect. We review some of the key variables in each cat...

Eyewitness testimony.

The criminal justice system relies heavily on eyewitness identification for investigating and prosecuting crimes. Psychology has built the only scientific literature on eyewitness identification and has warned the justice system of problems with eyewitness identification evidence. Recent DNA exoneration cases have corroborated the warnings of eyewitness identification researchers by showing tha...

THE RELIABILITY OF EYEWITNESS CONFIDENCE 1 Initial Eyewitness Confidence Reliably Predicts Eyewitness Identification Accuracy

Eyewitness memory is widely believed to be unreliable because (1) high-confidence eyewitness misidentifications played a role in over 70% of the now more than 300 DNA exonerations of wrongfully convicted men and women, (2) forensically-relevant laboratory studies have often reported a weak relationship between eyewitness confidence and accuracy, and (3) memory is sufficiently malleable that, no...

Eyewitness Identification

blank lineup (target absent lineup) A lineup in which all the members are known to be innocent . cognitive interview An interview technique designed to enhance memory and communication of events through the use of guided retrieval techniques . effective size The number of plausible members in a lineup . encoding specificity principle If cues that were present at encoding are also present at ret...