The effect of pre-event instructions on eyewitness identification

Abstract

Research on eyewitness identification often involves exposing participants to a simulated crime and later testing memory using a lineup. We conducted a systematic review showing that pre-event instructions, instructions given before event exposure, are rarely reported and those that are reported vary in the extent to which they warn participants about the nature of the event or tasks. At odds with the experience of actual witnesses, some studies use pre-event instructions explicitly warning participants of the upcoming crime and lineup task. Both the basic and applied literature provide reason to believe that pre-event instructions may affect eyewitness identification performance. In the current experiment, we tested the impact of pre-event instructions on lineup identification decisions and confidence. Participants received non-specific pre-event instructions (i.e., “watch this video”) or eyewitness pre-event instructions (i.e., “watch this crime video, you’ll complete a lineup later”) and completed a culprit-absent or -present lineup. We found no support for the hypothesis that participants who receive eyewitness pre-event instructions have higher discriminability than participants who receive non-specific pre-event instructions. Additionally, confidence-accuracy calibration was not significantly different between conditions. However, participants in the eyewitness condition were more likely to see the event as a crime and to make an identification than participants in the non-specific condition. Implications for conducting and interpreting eyewitness identification research and the basic research on instructions and attention are discussed.

Was he the perpetrator or a bystander? Testing theories of unconscious transference for eyewitness identification.

“…Colloff and Wixted (2020) recommended 500 participants per cell to yield 80% power to detect effects such as those from a previous eyewitness ID study utilizing pAUC (Wetmore et al, 2015). This sample size is consistent with several additional studies from the eyewitness field (e.g., Baldassari et al, 2023; M. A. Carlson, Carlson, & Fitzsimmons, 2023; Jones et al, 2020; Lockamyeir et al, 2020, 2021; Seale-Carlisle et al, 2019).…”

Witnesses who Experience Inattentional Blindness are Only Less Accurate and Confident Under Cued Compared to Free Recall

“…Participants took part in the current study online. Ensuring that participants remain naive to the study aims is an important feature of both inattentional blindness (Beanland & Pammer, 2010) and eyewitness memory research (Baldassari et al, 2023). To that end, the study was Paper presented at the 61 st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, online conference.…”

“…Inattentional blindness can also explain late attentional capture, where individuals may only notice an eyewitness event after it has occurred (e.g., traffic accident: Hyman et al, 2020). From a research perspective, the fact that witnesses may experience inattentional blindness for crimes is problematic because many eyewitness studies inform participants that they will witness a crime beforehand (Baldassari et al, 2023). Thus, these studies may overestimate witness memory by reducing instances of inattentional blindness and late attention capture.…”