Abstract
The effect of various focal length photographs on eyewitness identification accuracy
Highlights
Our ability to recognise human faces has been studied extensively in several contexts (e.g., Lindsay et al 2007; Tistarelli et al 2009; Hole and Bourne 2010; Lampinen et al 2012; Wilkinson and Rynn 2012; Fitzgerald et al 2018)
We examined the effect of different focal length photographs (24mm, 50mm, and 100mm) on eyewitness identification accuracy in simultaneous target-present lineups
The participants who viewed photographs taken with a 100mm focal length correctly identified the suspect more often than the participants who viewed photographs taken with a 24mm focal length, χ2(2) = 12.67, p = .002, Cramer’s V =
Summary
Our ability to recognise human faces has been studied extensively in several contexts (e.g., Lindsay et al 2007; Tistarelli et al 2009; Hole and Bourne 2010; Lampinen et al 2012; Wilkinson and Rynn 2012; Fitzgerald et al 2018). Portrait photographs (mostly passport style photos) are often used as stimuli (Lindsay et al 2007; Lampinen et al 2012). We should bear in mind that several factors have an effect on how portrait photography reflects reality (Třebický et al 2016), such as exposure (e.g., under- or overexposure of images and the inappropriate use of ISO, shutter speed, and aperture combinations), depth of field (e.g., the parameter related to focal length and aperture of the lens as well as to focusing distance from the subject), optical aberrations of the lenses used (e.g., radial and perspective distortions), colour representations and light-. The use of different focal distances may have an effect on objects in the picture, resulting in different degrees of distortion. Třebický et al (2016) note that the most common types of distortion in photography are radial distortions, where straight lines are rendered as curved lines
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