The Effect of Pre-Event Instructions on Eyewitness Identification Stage 2 Registered Report Accepted Manuscript

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 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 impact eyewitness identification performance. In Experiment 1, we will test the effect of pre-event instructions on lineup identification decisions and confidence. Participants will receive 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 line-up later”) and complete a culprit absent or present lineup. In Experiment 2, we will manipulate exposure duration and pre-event instructions to determine if pre-event instructions differentially impact high or low quality eyewitness events. If pre-event instructions impact eyewitness identification accuracy, then the findings of existing studies need to be considered in the context of their pre-event instructions and future work will be needed to determine how instructions interact with existing systems and estimator variables.

Crime blindness: The impact of inattentional blindness on eyewitness awareness, memory, and identification

“…The finding of crime blindness in our experiments and by other researchers (Chabris et al, 2011; Cullen et al, 2017; Rivardo et al, 2011) has substantial ramifications for future research and applications in eyewitness memory. Most experimental studies of eyewitness memory use simple events so that people quickly become aware of the crime (Baldassari et al, in press). These designs may not generalize to complex situations or times when people are not watching for a crime or accident.…”

“…Unfortunately, most investigations of eyewitness memory do not explicitly report information on the attention instructions provided to participants. In a recent review of instructions, Baldassari et al (in press) found that most reports include no information regarding what participants are told prior to viewing a video of a crime for an experiment.…”

And like that, they were gone: A failure to remember recently attended unique faces

“…Our data further show that having paid attention is not always sufficient for identification of a face, even at a short encoding-test latency: an unexpected identification task yielded poor accuracy for a face that was attended several seconds ago. Thus, the expectation of memory report should be explicitly controlled or manipulated in related studies (which has been shown to not be the case; Baldassari et al, 2021), as encoding cannot be assumed from participants having paid attention in such studies. It is also important to note that this gap between attention and intention of encoding is more observable when participants are entrenched in a cover task, such as in the current design where participants completed 27 pre-surprise location report trials before the surprise identity report trial.…”