Post-identification Feedback to Eyewitnesses: Psychological Processes and Forensic Consequences

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9807399WellsThere is increasingly strong evidence that eyewitness identification of criminal suspects from lineups and photospreads is associated with two problems. First, it occurs with surprising frequency and second, that false identifications are often associated with high levels of confidence on the part of the witness and this can lead jurors to accept the false identification as though it were accurate. Recent work by the PI indicates that confirming feedback not only produces inflation of confidence among those who have made false identifications, but also leads witnesses to exaggerate how good their view was of the culprit, the amount of attention they paid during witnessing , how easily they were able to pick the person from the lineup and so on. The current experiments will use the PIs post-identification feedback paradigm to test the hypothesis that the processes leading to confidence inflation are not conscious and re not easily reversed. The experiments will test the effects of timing of feedback the type of feedback, the passage of time after feedback, and the accuracy of identification on eyewitnesses' reports of confidence, prior view, recollections of prior descriptions, attention ease of identification , and other eyewitness judgments. In addition the research will assess mock-jurors' impressions of the testimony of the eyewitnesses as a function of the feedback manipulation . The results will have significant implication for our understanding of how eyewitness confidence develops, why it changes, how confidence becomes dissociated form accuracy, and the implications for jurors' assessments of eyewitness credibility.