Active exploration of faces in police lineups increases discrimination accuracy

Colloff, Melissa F.; Flowe, Heather D.; Smith, Harriet M. J.; Seale-Carlisle, Travis M.; Meissner, Christian A.; Rockey, James; Sinha, Meenakshi; Kujur, Pratibha; Parveen, Noorshama; Chandel, Priyanka; Singh, Margaret Messiah; Pradhan, Sraddha; Parganiha, Arti

doi:10.31234/osf.io/tvga4

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 64 publications

(108 reference statements)

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“…Further, we found in two experiments, one conducted in lab and the other online, that interactive lineups boost discrimination accuracy over static frontal pose lineups, increasing the correct identification of guilty suspects by 18% 42 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Perpetrator pose reinstatement during a lineup test increases discrimination accuracy

Mf¹,

Tm²,

Karoğlu³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Recently, the field of eyewitness identification has undergone a radical transformation, using signal-detection theory, models, and associated analyses to answer the important applied question of how police should test a witness’s memory of a criminal perpetrator. Here, we used these analytical techniques and the basic science of face memory to examine how encoding view influences the information that is stored in and retrieved from memory during an eyewitness identification task. Participants watched a simulated crime and we varied the angle from which they viewed the perpetrator. In Experiment 1, participants (N=2,904) were tested with a static photo lineup; the viewing angle of the lineup members was the same or different from the perpetrator at encoding. In Experiment 2, participants (N=1,430) were tested with a novel interactive lineup in which they could rotate the lineup faces into any angle. In both experiments, discrimination accuracy was greater when the viewing angle at encoding and test matched. Interestingly, participants also naturally reinstated the angle of the interactive faces to match their encoding angle. Our results highlight the importance of encoding specificity for eyewitness identification, and reveal that people actively seek out information in the testing environment that matches the study environment to aid memory retrieval. Our study demonstrates how memory findings and analytical techniques from the basic science literature can enhance our understanding of applied eyewitness memory processes, and ultimately reduce memory errors that can have devastating consequences in the real world.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Perpetrator pose reinstatement during a lineup test increases discrimination accuracy

Mf¹,

Tm²,

Karoğlu³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…For unfamiliar faces, studies generally support the notion that matching a single photo to an array or to a composite image leads to better performance than matching to a different single photo (e.g., White, Burton, et al, 2014). Recent work suggests that using interactive lineups (i.e., lineups that allow for different angles of a face to be viewed) leads to more correct identifications than when using lineups comprised of only still images (Colloff, Flowe, et al, 2020; Colloff, Seale-Carlisle, et al, 2020; Smith et al, 2020). Allowing observers to manipulate the angle from which a lineup is viewed can be thought of as a means to become familiar with the systematic variability in faces.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Within-person variability contributes to more durable learning of faces.

Corpuz¹,

Oriet²

2022

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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Exposure to the natural, unsystematic within-person variability present across different encounters with a face (e.g., differences in emotion, makeup, and hairstyle) increases the likelihood the face will be recognized despite changes in appearance. In most studies, participants’ memories are tested with a matching task administered shortly after exposure to a set of training images. In the real world, however, the time between when a face is first encountered and when it needs to be identified can be much longer. We hypothesized that in addition to facilitating acquisition of a representation of a face, unsystematic variability might also lead to better retention. To test this, in two experiments participants were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: (a) no variability (still image), (b) systematic variability (changes in camera angle and pose in an otherwise constant setting), and (c) unsystematic variability (changes in hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and setting). Participants completed a sorting task 15 min and 5 days after viewing the target identity. Unsystematic variability led to better recognition than systematic variability, and this benefit was not reduced after a 5-day delay. Although participants expected their memory to be worse with a 5-day delay than with a 15-min delay, both overall accuracy and the advantage for training with unsystematic variability were virtually unaffected. The results suggest that exposure to unsystematic variability influences not only the initial acquisition of faces but also contributes to establishing a durable, flexible representation of faces in memory.

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“…Such a procedure will not only confer some of the benefits of familiar face processing but will also enable the operator to manoeuvre comparison faces into the same viewpoint, reducing within‐person variability across images. The procedure has been successfully employed in face memory tasks, with higher discrimination accuracy observed in an interactive line‐up compared to a line‐up composed of static images of faces, which is commonly used by US police (Colloff, Flowe, et al., 2020; Colloff, Seale‐Carlisle, et al., 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance of typical and superior face recognizers on a novel interactive face matching procedure

Smith

Andrews

Baguley

et al. 2021

British J of Psychology

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Unfamiliar simultaneous face matching is error prone. Reducing incorrect identification decisions will positively benefit forensic and security contexts. The absence of viewindependent information in static images likely contributes to the difficulty of unfamiliar face matching. We tested whether a novel interactive viewing procedure that provides the user with 3D structural information as they rotate a facial image to different orientations would improve face matching accuracy. We tested the performance of 'typical' (Experiment 1) and 'superior' (Experiment 2) face recognizers, comparing their performance using high-quality (Experiment 3) and pixelated (Experiment 4) Facebook profile images. In each trial, participants responded whether two images featured the same person with one of these images being either a static face, a video providing orientation information, or an interactive image. Taken together, the results show that fluid orientation information and interactivity prompt shifts in criterion and support matching performance. Because typical and superior face recognizers both benefited from the structural information provided by the novel viewing procedures, our results point to qualitatively similar reliance on pictorial encoding in these groups. This also suggests that interactive viewing tools can be valuable in assisting face matching in highperforming practitioner groups.Photo-ID is necessary for identity verification in a range of settings, from crossing borders to buying age-restricted goods and accessing services. However, despite the wide use of photo-ID, simultaneous face matching is error-prone. In controlled laboratory and field studies, error rates between 10 and 30% are typically observed (Bruce et al., 1999;Megreya & Burton, 2006. False alarms (i.e., incorrectly assigning two people to the sameThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Active exploration of faces in police lineups increases discrimination accuracy

Cited by 3 publications

References 64 publications

Perpetrator pose reinstatement during a lineup test increases discrimination accuracy

Perpetrator pose reinstatement during a lineup test increases discrimination accuracy

Within-person variability contributes to more durable learning of faces.

Performance of typical and superior face recognizers on a novel interactive face matching procedure

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