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

证人能准确地识别嫌疑人吗？在指认嫌疑犯或说出犯罪过程中发生的事情时，我们能始终如一地准确地辨认出嫌疑人的脸吗？鉴于目击者的错误证词会导致错误的定罪，而且陪审员对目击者的证词非常重视，了解证人的准确性是否稳定将会有所帮助。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了一个目击事件的目击者记忆。因此，本项目旨在调查：(1)证人记忆表现的稳定性，无论是在证人任务内部还是跨证人任务（例如，列队，证人对犯罪事件的报告，以及对错误信息的抵抗力）；(2)在预测证人表现时，一些个体差异变量的强度，包括人格和认知特征。该项目将对跨越多个学习阶段的五个简短的目击事件，在目击准确性任务内部和跨证人准确性任务（指认准确性；事件的准确记忆；以及对事件后误导性信息的抵抗力）中检验证人准确性的稳定性。对五个单独的证人事件使用重复的证人任务，可以比以前的研究更敏感、更普遍地衡量证人的准确性。证人准确性的稳定性对刑事司法系统中的决策者（例如陪审员、检察官、警察等）在评估证人陈述或不同证人相互矛盾的陈述的可能准确性方面具有重要的更广泛的影响，因为现实世界的证人需要在他们的身份和他们关于犯罪的事件报告中都是准确的。此外，所提出的程序可能为调查证人的准确性提供一个新的范例。该项目还将支持对研究生的培训，并使本科生研究助理接触到研究过程。

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.