Testing a new lineup procedure with children: The elimination with wildcard

The role of experimenter familiarity in children’s eyewitness identification

“…Sixty children were recruited from a local Nuffield Health crèche facility and were familiar with the experimenter, and 60 children were recruited from a primary school and were unfamiliar with the experimenter. This number of participants is similar to previous studies that have used an eyewitness paradigm with the same age group (Havard & Memon, 2013 ; Karageorge & Zajac, 2011 ; Thompson et al., 2020 ). The mean age for familiar participants was 6.3 years of age, and the mean age for unfamiliar participants was 6.7 years of age.…”

“…For example, Thompson et al. ( 2020 ) combined the elimination procedure with the wildcard and found that this method was the most effective in reducing false identifications. While the ‘elimination with wildcard’ procedure seems to be a promising technique to further improve children’s identification accuracy on TA lineups, other researchers have argued that the wildcard may be interpreted more along the lines of a ‘not sure’ response rather than a definitive ‘not there’ response, and it has been suggested that the lineup should contain both ‘not sure’ and ‘not there’ options (Pica et al., 2020 ; Wells et al., 2020 ).…”

Identification performance across the life span: Lineups and the reaction time-based Concealed Information Test

“…Regarding social impact factors of identification performance, strong and consistent evidence suggests that perceived social pressure affects children's lineup decisions. For example, children's lineup performance profits from unbiased instructions (Pozzulo & Dempsey, 2006), and a salient lineup rejection option (Dunlevy & Cherryman, 2013;Karageorge & Zajac, 2011;Thompson et al, 2020;Zajac & Karageorge, 2009). These findings emphasize the beneficial value of applying best practice lineup procedures that attenuate implicit demands of the lineup task.…”

“…Researchers have tried to improve the diagnosticity of identifications in children and older adults by adapting existing identification procedures, aiming to mitigate the social demands of the lineup task (for children), and to facilitate discrimination between innocent and guilty lineup members (for older adults; Colloff et al, 2017). For example, removing social bias from lineup presentation and lineup instructions increase children's identification performance (Beresford & Blades, 2006;Pozzulo & Lindsay, 1997, 1999Pozzulo et al, 2009;Price & Fitzgerald, 2016;Thompson et al, 2020) and fair lineup composition improves identification performance in older adults (Colloff et al, 2017). However, even with those improvements, false identification rates remain substantial.…”