Eyewitness Memory & Mistaken Identifications

There are many reasons why an eyewitness may erroneously identify an innocent suspect as having been a culprit to a crime. Our lab explores the effect of different factors on eyewitness memory and how they may impact eyewitness accuracy.

 

For example, in a set of recent studies, participants studied faces in consistent or inconsistent contexts. At test, that individual either appeared in the same or a different context. Results revealed that stronger associative memory between an individual and the context in which they encountered them reduced the likelihood of a mistaken source attribution. In another study, the data revealed that witness source attributions are heavily dependent on the retention interval between when they encountered the actual culprit and an innocent suspect.

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Jury Decision-Making and Interpersonal Metacognition

Eyewitnesses are not the only people with difficult tasks in the legal system. Jurors have a very daunting task of considering many critical pieces of information when they have to provide a verdict decision. Our lab examines how jurors might approach this task.

 

In a series of studies, I have investigated how jurors interpret eyewitness confidence, and how the statement is expressed impacts jurors' perceptions of witness accuracy. My work has shown that statement expression impacts not only perceptions of confidence, but also accuracy, how much attention they think the witness paid, how good of a view the witness had, as well as other assumptions about the witness's viewing experience. In this line of work, we specifically focus on how jurors interpret information that is presented to them.

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Deception Detection and Perceptions of Veracity

How do we decide if someone is lying or telling the truth? Deception is prevalent in our everyday life as well as within the legal system. How do we know whether we really look good in a dress? Is a suspect lying about their whereabouts on the night of the crime? What makes a statement appear more credible? These are some of the questions that we address.

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For example, for everyday lies, there are factors that heavily influence our ability to discriminate between truthful and deceptive statements. In a series of studies, I explore factors such as the amount of practice a liar has had, how familiar the person making a veracity assessment is with the speaker, the type of statement that is to be assessed and how they impact our ability to detect every day (or low stakes) lies. Within a legal setting, false confessions are viewed as the "gold standard" of evidence that could be presented at trial. However, these false confessions are, at their core, a lie. I have investigated how these highly consequential real world lies compare to what we know about lies that are obtained in a laboratory setting and if there are any reliable ways to discriminate a truthful from a deceptive statement.

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Perception and Recognition of Sexual Assault and Child

Sexual Assault

Unfortunately, sexual assault is a frequently occurring event. However, early recognition of an assault or precursor behavior and intervention can lead to a reduction in its occurrence. This line of work focuses on sexual assault and issues of consent (e.g., implied consent) and recognition of grooming behaviors as a precursor to child sexual abuse (CSA).

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In a recent study Kayla and I examined how knowing whether CSA occurred or not colors the interpretation of adult-child interactions between same- and opposite-sex adult-child pairings. When participants were explicitly told that abuse occurred (hindsight condition), they indicated they believed the behaviors mentioned to be more indicative of grooming compared to those who had not been told abuse occurred (foresight condition). These data highlight a discrepancy in how grooming behaviors are interpreted in the moment compared to when outcome information (i.e., the child was abused by this person) is known.

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