An account of the own-race bias and the contact hypothesis based on a "face space" model of face recognition. In T. Valentine (Ed.), Cognitive and computational aspects of face recognition: Explorations in face space (pp. 64 -94). London, England: Routledge.

A mock-jury study was conducted to examine juror sensitivity to eyewitness identification evidence. Subjects were 129 eligible and experienced jurors from Dane County, Wisconsin, who viewed a vi[deotaped trial that involved an eyewitness identification. Ten factors associated with the crime and the identification (e.g., disguise of the perpetrator, retention interval, confidence of the witness) were manipulated. The results of this mock-jury study were combined with those of a previous study using tile same experimental stimuli and procedures, but using undergraduates as subjects. This analysis showed that the confidence of the eyewitness was the most powerful predictor of verdicts (p < .05) and that differences between undergraduates and eligible jurors in their sensitivity to eyewitness evidence were negligible.

The lay-person's knowledge of the factors that influence eyewitness memory was examined by evaluating the manner in which mock jurors integrated eyewitness evidence to draw inferences about defendant culpability and the likelihood that an identification was correct. Three hundred and twenty-one undergraduates viewed a videotaped trial within which ten witness and identification factors were manipulated between trials. Manipulation checks showed that subjects demonstrated superior memory for the evidence and the manipulated variables had their intended impact on appropriate rating scales. However, only one variable, witness confidence, had reliable effects on subjects' perceptions of culpability, on the perceived likelihood that the identification was correct, and on several other relevant dependent variables. Eight variables that have been shown to affect identification accuracy in the empirical literature had trivial effects on mock jurors' inferences. It was concluded that lay-people are insensitive to the factors that influence eyewitness memory.

This study examines the effects of 14 estimator variables (e.g., disguise of robber, exposure time, weapon visibility) and system variables (e.g., lineup instructions, exposure to mugshots) on a number of measures of eyewitness performance: identification accuracy, choosing rates, confidence in lineup choice, relation between confidence and identification accuracy, memory for peripheral details, memory for physical characteristics of target, and time estimates. Subjects viewed a videotaped reenactment of an armed robbery and later attempted an identification. Characteristics of the videotape and lineup task were manipulated. Prominent findings were as follows: identification accuracy was affected by both estimator and system variables including disguise of robber, weapon visibility, elaboration instructions, and lineup instructions. Memory for peripheral details was positively correlated with choosing on the identification task but negatively correlated with identification accuracy.

We examined the effects of context reinstatement procedures on eyewitness identification accuracy. Subjects were 290 undergraduates who viewed a videotaped reenactment of a liquor store robbery and, in a later session, attempted to identify the robber from a lineup parade. Two types of context reinstatement procedures were examined together with eight encoding, storage, and retrieval variables manipulated within the stimulus videotape and the lineup procedures. Disguise of the robber impaired identification accuracy (p < .05). There was a significant interaction between disguise and the context reinstatement interview (p < .01) such that the context reinstatement interview had a stronger impact on identification accuracy in the high-disguise condition. Lineup cues interacted with lineup composition (p < .05), retention interval (p = .01), and exposure to mug shots (p = .05; although in a manner contrary to our expectation). These interactions indicated that lineup context cues improved identification accuracy in the high-similarity, 2-week retention interval, and no mug-shots conditions.