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

证人是否能准确指认嫌疑人？在辨认嫌疑犯或说出犯罪过程中发生的事情时，一个人的脸总是准确的？鉴于错误的目击者证词会导致错误的定罪，而且陪审员非常重视目击者的证词，了解目击者的准确性是否稳定将是有帮助的。传统的目击者研究并没有回答这些问题，因为大多数研究只调查目击者对单一目击事件的记忆。因此，本项目旨在研究：（1）证人记忆表现的稳定性，包括在证人任务内和证人任务之间（例如，（2）在预测目击者表现时，一些个体差异变量的强度，包括人格和认知特征。该项目将检查证人准确性的稳定性，包括在证人准确性任务（阵容识别准确性;事件的准确记忆;以及对有关事件的误导性事后信息的抵抗力）中以及在多个研究会议中的五个简短目击事件。对五个独立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、更普遍的证人准确性测量。证人准确性的稳定性对决策者有重要的更广泛的影响（例如，陪审员、检察官、警官等）鉴于真实的世界证人需要准确地指认和报告犯罪事件，因此，在刑事司法系统中，评估证人陈述或不同证人的相互矛盾的陈述的可能准确性。此外，拟议的程序可能会提供一个新的模式，调查证人的准确性。该项目还将支持培训一名研究生，并使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.