It's been 20+ years since researchers recommended that police videorecord lineups. But no one has empirically tested the diagnostic value of these videos... until now.

Here, we provide a compelling case to mandate the videorecording of lineup procedures.

Finding #3:
Witnesses' lineup behavior can diagnose high-confidence mistaken identifications. When witnesses are highly confident but their behavior indicates a weak and disfluent recognition experience, the CJS system should doubt their accuracy.

Finding #2:
Not only did witness behaviors discriminate between accurate and inaccurate decisions, but they also improved classification performance over and above confidence and decision speed.

Finding #1:
Accurate witnesses behaved markedly different than inaccurate witnesses—a strong and fluent recognition experience implied accuracy and a weak and disfluent recognition experience implied inaccuracy.

That’s kinda the idea behind dual process signal detection theory (DPSDT)! DPSDT posits that positive decisions are governed by two processes - recollection and familiarity- whereas negative (rejection) decisions are only governed by familiarity.

These findings contradict recent inferences that in the context of eyewitness lineups, target variability is less than or equal to lure variability and brings models of eyewitness memory in line with longstanding findings from the basic recognition literature!

Here, we examined DPSDT and UVSDT models & found that they were able to account for residual asymmetry (& improved model fit relative to the EVSDT model). These models suggest that the visual recognition system is better at detecting target presence than target absence.

When lineups are modified so that we always get suspect-specific confidence (see prev work on the Rule Out), the rejection-inferiority effect is reduced but not eliminated.

Lineups are a flawed measurement tool. Suspect IDs & confidence directly map on to how well the suspect matches the witness’s memory for the culprit- a good proxy for guilt. Conversely, rejection decisions & confidence often measure memory strength of a filler.

Good luck on your talk- wish I could be there to see it!!! I’m really feeling the FOMO this year with so many cool eyewitness sessions 🫠

Double-blind lineups
are still susceptible to
admin influence.

- Jones, “Blind Lineup Administrators’ Behaviors and Eyewitness Identifications”

#APLS2025 #AcademicHaiku #PsychLaw