Do sequential lineups impair underlying\xa0discriminability?

Matthew Kaesler,Keith Ransom,Carolyn Semmler,John C Dunn

doi:10.1186/s41235-020-00234-5

Abstract

Debate regarding the best way to test and measure eyewitness memory has dominated the eyewitness literature for more than 30 years. We argue that resolution of this debate requires the development and application of appropriate measurement models. In this study we developed models of simultaneous and sequential lineup presentations and used these to compare these procedures in terms of underlying discriminability and response bias, thereby testing a key prediction of diagnostic feature detection theory, that underlying discriminability should be greater for simultaneous than for stopping-rule sequential lineups. We fit the models to the corpus of studies originally described by Palmer and Brewer (2012, Law and Human Behavior, 36(3), 247–255), to data from a new experiment and to eight recent studies comparing simultaneous and sequential lineups. We found that although responses tended to be more conservative for sequential lineups there was little or no difference in underlying discriminability between the two procedures. We discuss the implications of these results for the diagnostic feature detection theory and other kinds of sequential lineups used in current jurisdictions.

Highlights

Debate regarding the best way to test and measure eyewitness memory has dominated the eyewitness literature for more than 30 years
Our results revealed little to no simultaneous advantage in underlying discriminability, the effect may be smaller than our study could detect, and a substantial shift in response bias in that eyewitnesses given sequential lineups require more evidence to identify an item
Faces were sorted from most similar to all others to least similar to all others. While this ordering served as a guide, we identified a set of featurebased exclusion criteria, some of which related to distinctive non-biological features that appear in the photographs and others that related to constraints in terms of isolating a suitably large feature-matched subset from within the corpus

Summary

Introduction

Debate regarding the best way to test and measure eyewitness memory has dominated the eyewitness literature for more than 30 years. We argue that resolution of this debate requires the development and application of appropriate measurement models. In this study we developed models of simultaneous and sequential lineup presentations and used these to compare these procedures in terms of underlying discriminability and response bias, thereby testing a key prediction of diagnostic feature detection theory, that underlying discriminability should be greater for simultaneous than for stopping-rule sequential lineups. We found that responses tended to be more conservative for sequential lineups there was little or no difference in underlying discriminability between the two procedures. We discuss the implications of these results for the diagnostic feature detection theory and other kinds of sequential lineups used in current jurisdictions

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion