We take an applied approach, with many projects having implications for eyewitness memory.
Click HERE to view a description of our projects on anger, identification, and assembling lineups.
Click HERE to view a description of our projects on threat, face processing, and immediate memory for threatening events.
Use of Base Rate Information By Juries
With Brittany Harman (Stony Brook University).We are examining whether laypeople are sensitive to the number of potential matches there are to a witness's description of a perpetrator. If six people are selected to stand in a lineup from among 5,000 matches, the likelihood of a target-absent lineup is not the same as it would be if the lineup had been drawn from 100 matches. The risk of a false identification thus also differs between these two base rates. We investigate whether and how well potential jurors take this information into account when they are presented with identification evidence.
Exaggeration Contagion
With Brittany Harman(Stony Brook University).Memory is influenced by input from others. This has been demonstrated in a variety of ways, including through different forms of feedback by lineup administrators, through introduction of misinformation by both authority figures and co-witnesses, and through manipulation of question framing. Our work follows from these findings and examines a more subtle type of effect. Rather than studying the influence of specific content on memory, we are examining whether a communicative style can become contagious. For example, will a witness who exaggerates specific situational details increase the likelihood that co-witnesses will exaggerate other details that are independent of that content? If so, are the co-witnesses aware of this influence?
Personality Attribution And Memory For Out-Group Faces
With Tim Paules (Stony Brook University).Identification of strangers' faces improves when the viewer performs a personality attribution task at encoding. Presumably, this occurs both because of increased elaboration on the target and because of potential means for rejecting new faces at test. Such outcomes, and particularly the latter, rely on personality attribution as a means of imposing distinctiveness on the targets. Our research combines this work with findings from the out-group homogeneity effect. Put simply, people tend to attribute a greater range of personal characteristics to members of their own in-group (including members of their own race) than they do to out-group members. This greater variability of characteristics predicts greater gain in ID accuracy from the attribution exercise. We examine whether the attribution of personality characteristics shows greater benefit for in-group than out-group faces. Importantly, we hold the physical stimuli constant and manipulate people's beliefs about in-group/out-group status of target faces by varying the nationality rather than race of targets.