Doctoral Dissertation Research: Stability and Trait-based Predictors of Eyewitness Performance

目击者辨认嫌疑人准确吗？S在辨认嫌疑人或讲述犯罪过程中发生的事情上始终如一地准确。鉴于目击者的错误证词会导致错误定罪，而且陪审员非常重视目击者的证词，了解证人的准确性是否稳定将是有帮助的。传统的目击者研究没有回答这些问题，因为大多数研究只检查目击者对单一目击事件的记忆。因此，本项目试图调查：(1)证人记忆表现的稳定性，无论是在证人任务中还是在证人任务之间(例如，阵容、犯罪事件的证人报告和对错误信息的抵抗)和(2)包括个性和认知特征在内的一些个体差异变量在预测证人表现方面的强度。该项目将审查证人准确性任务内和证人准确性任务之间的稳定性(指认名单的准确性；对事件的准确记忆；以及对事件的误导性事后信息的抵抗力)，包括多个研究会议上的五个简短目击事件。对五个不同的证人事件使用重复的证人任务将允许比先前的研究更敏感、更普遍地衡量证人准确性。证人准确性的稳定性对决策者(例如陪审员、检察官、警察等)具有重要的更广泛的影响。在刑事司法系统评价证人陈述或不同证人相互矛盾的陈述的可能准确性方面，考虑到现实世界的证人在其身份识别和关于犯罪的事件报告方面都需要准确。此外，拟议的程序可能会为调查证人的准确性提供一个新的范例。该项目还将支持对一名研究生的培训，并让本科生研究助理了解研究过程。

Are witnesses who are accurate at identifying a suspect?s face in a lineup consistently accurate at identifying suspects or in saying what happened during a crime? Given that erroneous eyewitness testimony contributes to wrongful convictions and that jurors give great weight to eyewitness testimony, knowing whether witness accuracy is stable would be helpful. Traditional eyewitness research does not answer these questions, as most studies examine eyewitness memory for only a single witnessed event. Thus, this project seeks to investigate: (1) the stability of witness memory performance, both within and across witness tasks (e.g., lineups, witness reports of criminal events, and resistance to misinformation) and (2) the strength of a number of individual difference variables, including personality and cognitive traits, in predicting eyewitness performance. The project will examine the stability of witness accuracy both within and across witness accuracy tasks (lineup identification accuracy; accurate memory of the events; and resistance to misleading post-event information about the events) for five brief witnessed events across multiple study sessions. The use of repeated witness tasks for five separate witness events will permit a more sensitive, more generalizable measure of witness accuracy than in prior research.The stability of witness accuracy has important broader impacts for decision makers (e.g., jurors, prosecutors, police officers, etc.) in the criminal justice system in evaluating the probable accuracy of witness statements or conflicting statements of different witnesses, given that real world witnesses need to be accurate in both their identifications and their event reports regarding a crime. Further, the proposed procedure may provide a new paradigm for investigating witness accuracy. The project will also support the training of a graduate student and expose undergraduate research assistants to the research process.