Biomedical subjects

Steve D Charman

Publications and source records attributed to Steve D Charman.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2007

Eyewitness lineups: is the appearance-change instruction a good idea?

The Department of Justice's Guide for lineups recommends warning eyewitnesses that the culprit's appearance might have changed since the time of the crime. This appearance-change instruction (ACI) has never been empirically tested. A video crime with four culprits was viewed by 289 participants who then attempted to identify the culprits from four 6-person arrays that either included or did not include the culprit. Participants either received the ACI or not and all were warned that the culprit might or might not be in the arrays. The culprits varied in how much their appearance changed from the video to their lineup arrays, but the ACI did not improve identification decisions for any of the lineups. Collapsed over the four culprits, the ACI increased false alarms and filler identifications but did not increase culprit identifications. The ACI reduced confidence and increased response latency. Two processes that could account for these results are discussed, namely a decision criterion shift and a general increase in ecphoric similarity.

Crime↗

PubMed2005

Building face composites can harm lineup identification performance.

Face composite programs permit eyewitnesses to build likenesses of target faces by selecting facial features and combining them into an intact face. Research has shown that these composites are generally poor likenesses of the target face. Two experiments tested the proposition that this composite-building process could harm the builder's memory for the face. In Experiment 1 (n = 150), the authors used 50 different faces and found that the building of a composite reduced the chances that the person could later identify the original face from a lineup when compared with no composite control conditions or with yoked composite-exposure control conditions. In Experiment 2 (n = 200), the authors found that this effect generalized to a simulated-crime video, but mistaken identifications from target-absent lineups were not inflated by composite building.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Distorted retrospective eyewitness reports as functions of feedback and delay.

Participant-witnesses viewed a crime video and attempted to identify the culprit from a culprit-absent lineup. The 253 mistaken-identification eyewitnesses were randomly given confirming, disconfirming, or no feedback regarding their identifications. Feedback was immediate or delayed 48 hr, and measures were immediate or delayed 48 hr. Confirming, but not disconfirming, feedback led to distortions of eyewitnesses' recalled confidence, amount of attention paid during witnessing, goodness of view, ability to make out facial details, length of time to identification, and other measures related to the witnessing experience. Unexpectedly, neither delaying the measures nor delaying feedback for 48 hr moderated these effects. The results underscore the need for double-blind lineups and neutral assessments of eyewitnesses' certainty and other judgments prior to feedback.

Attention↗