Eyewitnesses sometimes view faces from a distance, but little research has examined the accuracy of witnesses as a function of distance. The purpose to the present project is to examine the relationship between identification accuracy and distance under carefully controlled conditions. This is one of the first studies to examine the ability to recognize faces of strangers at a distance under free-field conditions. Participants viewed eight live human targets, displayed at one of six outdoor distances that varied between 5 and 40 yards. Participants were shown 16 photographs, 8 of the previously viewed targets and 8 of nonviewed foils that matched a verbal description of the target counterpart. Participants rated their confidence of having seen or not having seen each individual on an 8-point scale. Long distances were associated with poor recognition memory and response bias shifts.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of seven variables that emerge from forensic research on facial-composite construction and naming using contemporary police systems: EvoFIT, Feature and Sketch. Design/methodology/approach – The paper involves regression- and meta-analyses on composite-naming data from 23 studies that have followed procedures used by police practitioners for forensic face construction. The corpus for analyses contains 6,464 individual naming responses from 1,069 participants in 41 experimental conditions. Findings – The analyses reveal that composites constructed from the holistic EvoFIT system were over four-times more identifiable than composites from “Feature” (E-FIT and PRO-fit) and Sketch systems; Sketch was somewhat more effective than Feature systems. EvoFIT was more effective when internal features were created before rather than after selecting hair and the other (blurred) external features. Adding questions about the global appearance of the face (as part of the holistic-cognitive interview (H-CI)) gives a valuable improvement in naming over the standard face-recall cognitive interview (CI) for all three system types tested. The analysis also confirmed that composites were considerably less effective when constructed from a long (one to two days) compared with a short (0-3.5 hours) retention interval. Practical implications – Variables were assessed that are of importance to forensic practitioners who construct composites with witnesses and victims of crime. Originality/value – Using a large corpus of forensically-relevant data, the main result is that EvoFIT using the internal-features method of construction is superior; an H-CI administered prior to face construction is also advantageous (cf. face-recall CI) for EvoFIT as well as for two further contrasting production systems.

SummaryWhen an eyewitness suffers an impairment of memory for a perpetrator because the criminal used a weapon during the crime, this impairment is called the weapon focus effect. The literature is split on how this arises: Some implicate the narrowing of attentional cues to the weapon because the arousal of the victim increases, whereas others claim that the weapon is a novel object in most everyday contexts, and novel objects demand more attention than contextually appropriate ones. The current study employed a simulated crime paradigm featuring a normal, novel, or threatening object. Timing of the object's presentation was manipulated such that it was visible before, after, or during the time when the culprit's face was visible. Target‐present and target‐absent line‐ups as well as retrospective questions were administered. Both the novel object and the weapon resulted in increased mistaken identifications in target‐absent line‐ups. Structural equation modeling suggested that object novelty mediated this effect. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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