Memory and Decision in Eyewitness Identification

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Project Summary One of the defining characteristics of eyewitness identification is that a witness's willingness to make an identification may vary independently of the accuracy of that witness's memory. In other words, a witness may feel compelled to make an identification, and may believe that making an identification (as opposed to saying "none-of-the-above" or "I don't know") is the "right" thing to do, even if his or her memory of the perpetrator is not very clear, and even if no person in the lineup appears to be a clear choice. Given the view among legal scholars that eyewitness misidentification is the primary cause of wrongful conviction in the United States (Gross, Jacoby, Matheson, D Montgomery, & Patil, (2005); Huff, Rattner, & Sagarin, 1996), this disconnect between the willingness to identify and the ability to correctly identify presents a serious problem to the criminal justice system. Hesitant witnesses may fail to identify the guilty and overly-willing witnesses may falsely identify the innocent. The proposed research seeks to understand the way that witnesses make identification decisions and how their decision processes and strategies may be modified due to (a) lineup composition, (b) lineup presentation, and (c) communication between the witness and the person administering the lineup. The intellectual merit of the proposal lies in its unique use of mathematical and computer-simulation modeling techniques closely coordinated with empirical laboratory research to address fundamental questions about the memory and decision processes that underlie eyewitness identification decisions. These techniques allow the model to generate quantitative predictions that can be compared to human data in order to evaluate how well our theories about eyewitness identification correspond to what eyewitnesses actually do. The research will also have a broad impact as well by: (a) creating a research and teaching laboratory to train doctoral and undergraduate students in theoretically-driven and applied research, (b) involving the active participation of a diverse student body at the University of California, Riverside, (c) contributing to the research infrastructure by developing computer programs, stimulus materials, and data archives, available to other researchers, in addition to the published and public presentations of the research at professional interdisciplinary meetings, and (d) deepening our understanding of a complex intersection of psychological and legal research, that has relevance to important social issues within the criminal justice system.