The effect of retention interval on the confidence-accuracy relationship for eyewitness identification

The effects of non-diagnostic information on confidence and decision making

Many decision-making tasks are characterized by a combination of diagnostic and non-diagnostic information, yet models of responding and confidence almost exclusively focus on the contribution of diagnostic information (e.g., evidence associated with stimulus discriminability), largely ignoring the contribution of non-diagnostic information. An exception is Baranski and Petrusic's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24(3), 929-945, (1998) doubt-scaling model, which predicts a negative relationship between non-diagnostic information and confidence, and between non-diagnostic information and accuracy. In two perceptual-choice tasks, we tested the effects of manipulating non-diagnostic information on confidence, accuracy and response time (RT). In Experiment 1, participants viewed a dynamic grid consisting of flashing blue, orange and white pixels and indicated whether the stimulus was predominantly blue or orange (using a response scale ranging from low-confidence blue to high-confidence orange), with the white pixels constituting non-diagnostic information. Increasing non-diagnostic information reduced both confidence and accuracy, generally slowed RTs, and led to an increase in the speed of errors. Experiment 2 replicated these results for a decision-only task, providing further support for the doubt-scaling model of confidence.

Confidence judgments are associated with face identification accuracy: Findings from a confidence forced-choice task

Confidence is assumed to be an indicator of identification accuracy in legal practices (e.g., forensic face examination). However, it is not clear whether people can evaluate the correctness of their face-identification decisions reliably using confidence reports. In the current experiment, confidence in the correctness of the perceptual decision was measured with a confidence forced-choice methodology: Upon completion of two perceptual face-identity matching trials, the participants were asked to compare the two decisions and to select the trial on which they felt more confident. On each face-identity matching trial, participants viewed three face images (two same-identity images, one different-identity image) and were instructed to select the image of the different identity. In order to measure the extent to which difficulty level informs confidence decisions, we selected face-image triads using item-difficulty estimates extracted from psychometric modeling applied in a prior study. The difference in difficulty between the paired face-image triads predicted the proportion of high-confidence judgments allocated to the easier trial of the pair. Consistent with the impact of difficulty monitoring on confidence judgments, performance was significantly more accurate on trials associated with higher confidence. Overall, the results suggested that people reliably evaluate the correctness of their perceptual face-identity matching decisions and use trial difficulty to evaluate confidence.

Metamnemonic predictions of lineup identification

After a crime is committed, investigators may query witnesses about whether they believe they will be to identify the perpetrator. However, we know little about how such metacognitive judgments are related to performance on a subsequent lineup identification task. The extant research has found the strength of this relationship to be small or nonexistent, which conflicts with the large body of literature indicating a moderate relationship between predictions and performance on memory tasks. In Studies 1-3, we induce variation in encoding quality by having participants watch a mock crime video with either low, medium, or high exposure quality, and then assess their future lineup performance. Calibration analysis revealed that assessments of future lineup performance were predictive of identification accuracy. This relationship was driven primarily by poor performance following low assessments. Studies 4 and 5 showed that these predictions are not based on a witness's evaluation of their encoding experience, nor on a contemporaneous assessment of memory strength. These results reinforce the argument that variation in memory quality is needed to obtain reliable relationships between predictions and performance. An unexpected finding is that witnesses who made a prediction shortly after encoding evinced superior memory compared to those who made a prediction later.

Eyewitness accuracy and retrieval effort: Effects of time and repetition

An important task for the law enforcement is to assess the accuracy of eyewitness testimonies. Recent research show that indicators of effortful memory retrieval, such as pausing and hedging (e.g. “I think”, “maybe”), are more common in incorrect recall. However, a limitation in these studies is that participants are interviewed shortly after witnessing an event, as opposed to after greater retention intervals. We set out to mitigate this shortcoming by investigating the retrieval effort-accuracy relationship over time. In this study, participants watched a staged crime and were interviewed directly afterwards, and two weeks later. Half the participants also carried out a repetition task during the two-week retention interval. Results showed that the retrieval-effort cues Delays and Hedges predicted accuracy at both sessions, including after repetition. We also measured confidence, and found that confidence also predicted accuracy over time, although repetition led to increased confidence for incorrect memories. Moreover, retrieval-effort cues partially mediated between accuracy and confidence.

Facing up to others' emotions: No evidence of autism-related deficits in metacognitive awareness of emotion recognition

Emotion recognition difficulties are considered to contribute to social‐communicative problems for autistic individuals and awareness of such difficulties may be critical for the identification and pursuit of strategies that will mitigate their adverse effects. We examined metacognitive awareness of face emotion recognition responses in autistic (N = 63) and non‐autistic (N = 67) adults across (a) static, dynamic and social face emotion stimuli, (b) free‐ and forced‐report response formats, and (c) four different sets of the six “basic” and six “complex” emotions. Within‐individual relationships between recognition accuracy and post‐recognition confidence provided no indication that autistic individuals were poorer at discriminating correct from incorrect recognition responses than non‐autistic individuals, although both groups exhibited marked inter‐individual variability. Although the autistic group was less accurate and slower to recognize emotions, confidence‐accuracy calibration analyses provided no evidence of reduced sensitivity on their part to fluctuations in their emotion recognition performance. Across variations in stimulus type, response format and emotion, increases in accuracy were associated with progressively higher confidence, with similar calibration curves for both groups. Calibration curves for both groups were, however, characterized by overconfidence at the higher confidence levels (i.e., overall accuracy less than the average confidence level), with the non‐autistic group contributing more decisions with 90%–100% confidence. Comparisons of slow and fast responders provided no evidence of a “hard‐easy” effect—the tendency to exhibit overconfidence during hard tasks and underconfidence during easy tasks—suggesting that autistic individuals' slower recognition responding may reflect a strategic difference rather than a processing speed limitation.

Forgetting faces over a week: investigating self-reported face recognition ability and personality

Background

Although face recognition is now well studied, few researchers have considered the nature of forgetting over longer time periods. Here, I investigated how newly learned faces were recognised over the course of one week. In addition, I considered whether self-reported face recognition ability, as well as Big Five personality dimensions, were able to predict actual performance in a recognition task.

Methods

In this experiment (N = 570), faces were learned through short video interviews, and these identities were later presented in a recognition test (using previously unseen images) after no delay, six hours, twelve hours, one day, or seven days.

Results

The majority of forgetting took place within the first 24 hours, with no significant decrease after that timepoint. Further, self-reported face recognition abilities were moderately predictive of performance, while extraversion showed a small, negative association with performance. In both cases, these associations remained consistent across delay conditions.

Discussion

The current work begins to address important questions regarding face recognition using longitudinal, real-world time intervals, focussing on participant insight into their own abilities, and the process of forgetting more generally.

Investigating the ease-of-retrieval effect in an eyewitness context

The way in which individuals think about their own cognitive processes plays an important role in various domains. When eyewitnesses assess their confidence in identification decisions, they could be influenced by how easily relevant information comes to mind. This ease-of-retrieval effect has a robust influence on people's cognitions in a variety of contexts (e.g., attitudes), but it has not yet been applied to eyewitness decisions. In three studies, we explored whether the ease with which eyewitnesses recall certain memorial information influenced their identification confidence assessments and related testimony-relevant judgements (e.g., perceived quality of view). We manipulated the number of reasons participants gave to justify their identification (Study 1; N = 343), and also the number of instances they provided of a weak or strong memory (Studies 2a & 2b; Ns = 350 & 312, respectively). Across the three studies, ease-of-retrieval did not affect eyewitnesses' confidence or other testimony-relevant judgements. We then tried - and failed - to replicate Schwarz, N., Bless, H., Strack, F., Klumpp, G., Rittenauer-Schatka, H., & Simons, A. (1991. Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(2), 195-202. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.61.2.195) original ease-of-retrieval finding (Study 3; N = 661). In three of the four studies, ease-of-retrieval had the expected effect on participants' perceived task difficulty; however, frequentist and Bayesian testing showed no evidence for an effect on confidence or assertiveness ratings.

O Efeito de Carga Emocional e Intervalo de Retenção na Memória de Testemunhas Oculares

Resumo Presenciar um crime é uma situação de grande estresse e com forte carga emocional, fatores diretamente relacionados à qualidade do relato de testemunhas oculares. Em dois experimentos, participantes assistiram a eventos com diferentes cargas emocionais (neutro, assalto ou assassinato) e forneceram seus relatos após diferentes intervalos de retenção (teste imediato, 7 dias, 14 dias ou 21 dias). Os resultados mostraram que a carga emocional não teve efeito na memória de testemunhas para aspectos do crime e características do criminoso. O evento com maior carga emocional teve um efeito benéfico na memória após um intervalo de 7 dias, mas tal efeito não ocorreu em intervalos mais longos. Implicações teóricas e práticas relacionadas à interpretação do relato de testemunhas são discutidas.

Convicting with confidence? Why we should not over-rely on eyewitness confidence

Eyewitness memory researchers have recently devoted considerable attention to eyewitness confidence. While there is strong consensus that courtroom confidence is problematic, we now recognise that an eyewitness's initial confidence in their first identification - in certain contexts - can be of value. A few psychological scientists, however, have confidently, but erroneously claimed that in real-world cases, eyewitness initial confidence is the most important indicator of eyewitness accuracy, trumping all other factors that might exist in a case. This claim accompanies an exaggeration of the role of eyewitnesses' "initial confidence" in the DNA exoneration cases. Still worse, overstated claims about the confidence-accuracy relationship, and eyewitness memory, have reached our top scientific journals, news articles, and criminal cases. To set the record straight, we review what we actually know and do not know about the "initial confidence" of eyewitnesses in the DNA exoneration cases. Further reasons for skepticism about the value of the confidence-accuracy relationship in real-world cases come from new analyses of a separate database, the National Registry of Exonerations. Finally, we review new research that reveals numerous conditions wherein eyewitnesses with high initial confidence end up being wrong.

The deceptive nature of associative word pairs: the effects of associative direction on judgments of learning

The accuracy of judgments of learning (JOLs) in forecasting later recall of cue-target pairs is sensitive to associative direction. JOLs are generally well calibrated for forward associative pairs (e.g., credit-card), but recall accuracy is often overestimated for backward pairs (e.g., card-credit). The present study further examines the effect of associative direction on JOL accuracy by comparing forward and backward pairs to unrelated pairs and symmetrical associates (e.g., salt-pepper)-a novel comparison. The correspondence between initial JOLs and recall accuracy was examined when study was either self-paced with concurrent JOLs (Experiment 1), when study/JOL duration was equated across pair types (Experiment 2), when JOLs were made immediately following study (Experiment 3), and when JOLs were made after a delay (Experiment 4). Across experiments, JOLs accurately estimated correct recall for forward pairs, but overestimated recall for symmetrical, backward, and unrelated pairs-an overestimation that was particularly robust for backward pairs. Calibration plots depicting JOL ratings against their corresponding recall accuracy indicated overestimations occurred for all pair types, though overestimations only occurred at high JOL ratings for symmetrical and forward pairs, a qualitative difference that was not captured in standard analyses of mean JOL and recall rates.

The impact of sleep on eyewitness identifications

Sleep aids the consolidation of recently acquired memories. Evidence strongly indicates that sleep yields substantial improvements on recognition memory tasks relative to an equivalent period of wake. Despite the known benefits that sleep has on memory, researchers have not yet investigated the impact of sleep on eyewitness identifications. Eyewitnesses to crimes are often presented with a line-up (which is a type of recognition memory test) that contains the suspect (who is innocent or guilty) and fillers (who are known to be innocent). Sleep may enhance the ability to identify the guilty suspect and not identify the innocent suspect (i.e. discriminability). Sleep may also impact reliability (i.e. the likelihood that the identified suspect is guilty). In the current study, we manipulated the presence or the absence of sleep in a forensically relevant memory task. Participants witnessed a video of a mock crime, made an identification or rejected the line-up, and rated their confidence. Critically, some participants slept between witnessing the crime and making a line-up decision, while others remained awake. The prediction that participants in the sleep condition would have greater discriminability compared to participants in the wake condition was not supported. There were also no differences in reliability.

The effects of repeated lineups and delay on eyewitness identification

A significant problem in eyewitness identification occurs when witnesses view a suspect in one venue such as a mugshot and then later in a lineup where the suspect is the only previously viewed person. Prior research has documented that the witness may select the suspect from the lineup due either to misplaced familiarity from seeing the mugshot or to their prior commitment from identifying the suspect from the mugshot. Two experiments attempted to minimize these biases by using repeated identical lineups, such that both targets and fillers were repeated, to determine if such a procedure could be useful. Across two experiments, we also varied the delay between seeing the event and the first lineup, as well as the delay between lineups. Despite the use of identical lineups, we continued to observe the effects of commitment and misplaced familiarity, so our procedure did not remove these problems. In addition, we also found that both repeated lineups and increasing delays can influence people's tendency to choose and their willingness to maintain their decisions, regardless of accuracy. Most importantly, however, despite the negative effects of repeated lineups and the relatively long delays used in our experiments, we obtained strong relations between confidence and accuracy when using confidence-accuracy characteristic plots. High confidence responses were associated with high accuracy.

Confidence of Older Eyewitnesses: Is It Diagnostic of Identification Accuracy?

Since the late 1980s evidence has been accumulating that confidence recorded at the time of identification is a reliable postdictor of eyewitness identification. Nonetheless, there may be noteworthy exceptions. In a re-analysis of a field study by Sauerland and Sporer (2009; N = 720; n = 436 choosers between 15 and 83 years old) we show that the postdictive value of confidence was reduced for participants aged 40 years or older. Different calibration indices and Bayesian analyses demonstrate a progressive dissociation between identification performance and confidence across age groups. While the confidence expressed following an identification remained unchanged across the lifespan, identification accuracy decreased. Young, highly confident witnesses were much more likely to be accurate than less confident witnesses. With increasing age, witnesses were more likely to be overconfident, particularly at the medium and high levels of confidence, and the postdictive value of confidence and decision times decreased. We conclude that witness age may be an important moderator to take into account when evaluating identification evidence.

The relationship between confidence and accuracy with verbal and verbal + numeric confidence scales

Police departments often use verbal confidence measures (highly confident, somewhat confident) with a small number of values, whereas psychologists measuring the confidence–accuracy relationship typically use numeric scales with a large range of values (20-point or 100-point scales). We compared verbal and verbal + numeric confidence scales for two different lineups, using either two or four levels of confidence. We found strong confidence–accuracy relationships that were unaffected by the nature of the scale at the highest level of confidence. High confidence corresponded to high accuracy with both two- and four-level scales, and the scale type (verbal only or verbal + numeric) did not matter. Police using a simple scale of “highly confident” and “somewhat confident” can, according to our results, rest assured that high confidence indicates high accuracy on a first identification from a lineup. In addition, our two lineups differed greatly in difficulty, yet the confidence–accuracy relationship was quite strong for both lineups, although somewhat lower for the more difficult lineup.

Eyewitness Identification: Live, Photo, and Video Lineups

The medium used to present lineup members for eyewitness identification varies according to the location of the criminal investigation. Although in some jurisdictions live lineups remain the default procedure, elsewhere this practice has been replaced with photo or video lineups. This divergence leads to two possibilities: Either some jurisdictions are not using the lineup medium that best facilitates accurate eyewitness identification or the lineup medium has no bearing on the accuracy of eyewitness identification. Photo and video lineups are the more practical options, but proponents of live lineups believe witnesses make better identification decisions when the lineup members are physically present. Here, the authors argue against this live superiority hypothesis. To be superior in practice, the benefits of live presentation would have to be substantial enough to overcome the inherent difficulties of organizing and administering a live lineup. The review of the literature suggests that even in experimental settings, where these difficulties can be minimized, it is not clear that live lineups are superior. The authors conclude that live lineups are rarely the best option in practice and encourage further research to establish which nonlive medium provides the best balance between probative value and practical utility.

Face value: testing the utility of contextual face cues for face recognition

The presence of multiple faces during a crime may provide a naturally-occurring contextual cue to support eyewitness recognition for those faces later. Across two experiments, we sought to investigate mechanisms underlying previously-reported cued recognition effects, and to determine whether such effects extended to encoding conditions involving more than two faces. Participants studied sets of individual faces, pairs of faces, or groups of four faces. At test, participants in the single-face condition were tested only on those individual faces without cues. Participants in the two and four-face conditions were tested using no cues, correct cues (a face previously studied with the target test face), or incorrect cues (a never-before-seen face). In Experiment 2, associative encoding was promoted by a rating task. Neither hit rates nor false-alarm rates were significantly affected by cue type or face encoding condition in Experiment 1, but cuing of any kind (correct or incorrect) in Experiment 2 appeared to provide a protective buffer to reduce false-alarm rates through a less liberal response bias. Results provide some evidence that cued recognition techniques could be useful to reduce false recognition, but only when associative encoding is strong.

Decision time and confidence predict choosers' identification performance in photographic showups

In vast contrast to the multitude of lineup studies that report on the link between decision time, confidence, and identification accuracy, only a few studies looked at these associations for showups, with results varying widely across studies. We therefore set out to test the individual and combined value of decision time and post-decision confidence for diagnosing the accuracy of positive showup decisions using confidence-accuracy characteristic curves and Bayesian analyses. Three-hundred-eighty-four participants viewed a stimulus event and were subsequently presented with two showups which could be target-present or target-absent. As expected, we found a negative decision time-accuracy and a positive post-decision confidence-accuracy correlation for showup selections. Confidence-accuracy characteristic curves demonstrated the expected additive effect of combining both postdictors. Likewise, Bayesian analyses, taking into account all possible target-presence base rate values showed that fast and confident identification decisions were more diagnostic than slow or less confident decisions, with the combination of both being most diagnostic for postdicting accurate and inaccurate decisions. The postdictive value of decision time and post-decision confidence was higher when the prior probability that the suspect is the perpetrator was high compared to when the prior probability that the suspect is the perpetrator was low. The frequent use of showups in practice emphasizes the importance of these findings for court proceedings. Overall, these findings support the idea that courts should have most trust in showup identifications that were made fast and confidently, and least in showup identifications that were made slowly and with low confidence.

The Effects of Alcohol Intoxication on Accuracy and the Confidence-Accuracy Relationship in Photographic Simultaneous Line-ups

Acute alcohol intoxication during encoding can impair subsequent identification accuracy, but results across studies have been inconsistent, with studies often finding no effect. Little is also known about how alcohol intoxication affects the identification confidence-accuracy relationship. We randomly assigned women (N = 153) to consume alcohol (dosed to achieve a 0.08% blood alcohol content) or tonic water, controlling for alcohol expectancy. Women then participated in an interactive hypothetical sexual assault scenario and, 24 hours or 7 days later, attempted to identify the assailant from a perpetrator present or a perpetrator absent simultaneous line-up and reported their decision confidence. Overall, levels of identification accuracy were similar across the alcohol and tonic water groups. However, women who had consumed tonic water as opposed to alcohol identified the assailant with higher confidence on average. Further, calibration analyses suggested that confidence is predictive of accuracy regardless of alcohol consumption. The theoretical and applied implications of our results are discussed.

The Relationship Between Eyewitness Confidence and Identification Accuracy: A New Synthesis

Summary

The U.S. legal system increasingly accepts the idea that the confidence expressed by an eyewitness who identified a suspect from a lineup provides little information as to the accuracy of that identification. There was a time when this pessimistic assessment was entirely reasonable because of the questionable eyewitness-identification procedures that police commonly employed. However, after more than 30 years of eyewitness-identification research, our understanding of how to properly conduct a lineup has evolved considerably, and the time seems ripe to ask how eyewitness confidence informs accuracy under more pristine testing conditions (e.g., initial, uncontaminated memory tests using fair lineups, with no lineup administrator influence, and with an immediate confidence statement). Under those conditions, mock-crime studies and police department field studies have consistently shown that, for adults, (a) confidence and accuracy are strongly related and (b) high-confidence suspect identifications are remarkably accurate. However, when certain non-pristine testing conditions prevail (e.g., when unfair lineups are used), the accuracy of even a high-confidence suspect ID is seriously compromised. Unfortunately, some jurisdictions have not yet made reforms that would create pristine testing conditions and, hence, our conclusions about the reliability of high-confidence identifications cannot yet be applied to those jurisdictions. However, understanding the information value of eyewitness confidence under pristine testing conditions can help the criminal justice system to simultaneously achieve both of its main objectives: to exonerate the innocent (by better appreciating that initial, low-confidence suspect identifications are error prone) and to convict the guilty (by better appreciating that initial, high-confidence suspect identifications are surprisingly accurate under proper testing conditions).

Caffeine cravings impair memory and metacognition

Cravings for food and other substances can impair cognition. We extended previous research by testing the effects of caffeine cravings on cued-recall and recognition memory tasks, and on the accuracy of judgements of learning (JOLs; predicted future recall) and feeling-of-knowing (FOK; predicted future recognition for items that cannot be recalled). Participants (N = 55) studied word pairs (POND-BOOK) and completed a cued-recall test and a recognition test. Participants made JOLs prior to the cued-recall test and FOK judgements prior to the recognition test. Participants were randomly allocated to a craving or control condition; we manipulated caffeine cravings via a combination of abstinence, cue exposure, and imagery. Cravings impaired memory performance on the cued-recall and recognition tasks. Cravings also impaired resolution (the ability to distinguish items that would be remembered from those that would not) for FOK judgements but not JOLs, and reduced calibration (correspondence between predicted and actual accuracy) for JOLs but not FOK judgements. Additional analysis of the cued-recall data suggested that cravings also reduced participants' ability to monitor the likely accuracy of answers during the cued-recall test. These findings add to prior research demonstrating that memory strength manipulations have systematically different effects on different types of metacognitive judgements.

To Veil or Not to Veil: Detecting Lies in The Courtroom. A Comment on Leach et al. (2016)

For the past 40 years, lie detection has predominantly been studied in the context of police-suspect and investigative interviews. In their paper, Leach et al. (2016) examined whether niqabs or hijabs interfere with the trial judges' ability to detect deception and concluded that veiling enhanced trial judges' ability to make accurate veracity judgments. In this comment, we argue that the conclusions made by Leach et al. are based upon an inaccurate experimental court paradigm and suffer from methodological and analytical issues. It is our opinion that the applicability of their research findings to real-life court proceedings alongside potential changes to court practices and policies based on Leach et al. should be regarded as naïve and misinformed.

US line-ups outperform UK line-ups

In the USA and the UK, many thousands of police suspects are identified by eyewitnesses every year. Unfortunately, many of those suspects are innocent, which becomes evident when they are exonerated by DNA testing, often after having been imprisoned for years. It is, therefore, imperative to use identification procedures that best enable eyewitnesses to discriminate innocent from guilty suspects. Although police investigators in both countries often administer line-up procedures, the details of how line-ups are presented are quite different and an important direct comparison has yet to be conducted. We investigated whether these two line-up procedures differ in terms of (i) discriminability (using receiver operating characteristic analysis) and (ii) reliability (using confidence-accuracy characteristic analysis). A total of 2249 participants watched a video of a crime and were later tested using either a six-person simultaneous photo line-up procedure (USA) or a nine-person sequential video line-up procedure (UK). US line-up procedure yielded significantly higher discriminability and significantly higher reliability. The results do not pinpoint the reason for the observed difference between the two procedures, but they do suggest that there is much room for improvement with the UK line-up.

Nosewitness Identification: Effects of Lineup Size and Retention Interval

Although canine identification of body odor (BO) has been widely used as forensic evidence, the concept of nosewitness identification by human observers was only recently put to the test. The results indicated that BOs associated with male characters in authentic crime videos could later be identified in BO lineup tests well above chance. To further evaluate nosewitness memory, we assessed the effects of lineup size (Experiment 1) and retention interval (Experiment 2), using a forced-choice memory test. The results showed that nosewitness identification works for all lineup sizes (3, 5, and 8 BOs), but that larger lineups compromise identification performance in similarity to observations from eye- and earwitness studies. Also in line with previous eye- and earwitness studies, but in disagreement with some studies on odor memory, Experiment 2 showed significant forgetting between shorter retention intervals (15 min) and longer retention intervals (1-week) using lineups of five BOs. Altogether this study shows that identification of BO in a forensic setting is possible and has limits and characteristics in line with witness identification through other sensory modalities.

Estimating the reliability of eyewitness identifications from police lineups

Laboratory-based mock crime studies have often been interpreted to mean that (i) eyewitness confidence in an identification made from a lineup is a weak indicator of accuracy and (ii) sequential lineups are diagnostically superior to traditional simultaneous lineups. Largely as a result, juries are increasingly encouraged to disregard eyewitness confidence, and up to 30% of law enforcement agencies in the United States have adopted the sequential procedure. We conducted a field study of actual eyewitnesses who were assigned to simultaneous or sequential photo lineups in the Houston Police Department over a 1-y period. Identifications were made using a three-point confidence scale, and a signal detection model was used to analyze and interpret the results. Our findings suggest that (i) confidence in an eyewitness identification from a fair lineup is a highly reliable indicator of accuracy and (ii) if there is any difference in diagnostic accuracy between the two lineup formats, it likely favors the simultaneous procedure.

The effects of distraction on metacognition and metacognition on distraction: evidence from recognition memory

The effects of auditory distraction in memory tasks have, to date, been examined with procedures that minimize participants' control over their own memory processes. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to metacognitive control factors which might affect memory performance. In this study, we investigate the effects of auditory distraction on metacognitive control of memory, examining the effects of auditory distraction in recognition tasks utilizing the metacognitive framework of Koriat and Goldsmith (1996), to determine whether strategic regulation of memory accuracy is impacted by auditory distraction. Results replicated previous findings in showing that auditory distraction impairs memory performance in tasks minimizing participants' metacognitive control (forced-report test). However, the results revealed also that when metacognitive control is allowed (free-report tests), auditory distraction impacts upon a range of metacognitive indices. In the present study, auditory distraction undermined accuracy of metacognitive monitoring (resolution), reduced confidence in responses provided and, correspondingly, increased participants' propensity to withhold responses in free-report recognition. Crucially, changes in metacognitive processes were related to impairment in free-report recognition performance, as the use of the "don't know" option under distraction led to a reduction in the number of correct responses volunteered in free-report tests. Overall, the present results show how auditory distraction exerts its influence on memory performance via both memory and metamemory processes.