Eyewitness lineups are typically composed of a suspect (guilty or innocent) and fillers (known innocents). Meta-analytic techniques were used to investigate the extent to which manipulations of suspectfiller similarity influenced identification decisions. Compared with lineups with moderate or high similarity fillers, lineups with low similarity fillers were far more likely to elicit suspect identifications. This was true regardless of whether the suspect was guilty or innocent, underscoring the importance of ensuring the suspect does not stand out from the fillers. Although whether the lineup contained moderate or high similarity fillers had no reliable influence on guilty suspect identifications, a higher rate of innocent suspect misidentifications was found for moderate similarity lineups. The correspondence between the meta-analytic findings and current lineup construction recommendations is discussed.
The authors manipulated stimulus contrast and response-stimulus interval in the alternating runs paradigm to investigate whether early processing could be carried out during a task switch. Subjects alternated between judging the magnitude and the parity of a digit. The results suggested that early processing was not carried out during the task switch (Experiment 1), even in the absence of potentially confounding auditory or visual warning signals (Experiment 2). This processing was, however, carried out in parallel with a demanding operation in a 2nd task (Experiment 3), using the display parameters of Experiments 1 and 2 in the psychological refractory period paradigm. It is concluded that, functionally, task switching may impose a hard bottleneck even for very early stimulus processing. ((c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)
Research suggests that subjects can compute the mean size of two sets of interspersed objects concurrently, but that doing so incurs a cost of dividing attention across the two sets. Alternatively, costs may arise from failing to exclude irrelevant items from the calculation of mean size. Here, we examined whether attention can be selectively deployed to prevent the inclusion of items from an irrelevant, concurrently displayed set in the computation of the relevant set's mean size. The results suggest that mean size is computed prior to the deployment of attention, failing to exclude processing of items that are irrelevant to the task. The influence of the irrelevant items is evident both with brief exposures of the set (200ms) and in a simultaneous judgment task with unlimited viewing time, suggesting that attention cannot be effectively deployed to facilitate selective averaging of the size of the relevant set. Size averaging appears to precede the deployment of selective attention, suggesting that it may be carried out automatically, without intention.
Eyewitness lineups typically contain a suspect (guilty or innocent) and fillers (known innocents). The degree to which fillers should resemble the suspect is a complex issue that has yet to be resolved. Previously, researchers have voiced concern that eyewitnesses would be unable to identify their target from a lineup containing highly similar fillers; however, our literature review suggests highly similar fillers have only rarely been shown to have this effect. To further examine the effect of highly similar fillers on lineup responses, we used morphing software to create fillers of moderately high and very high similarity to the suspect. When the culprit was in the lineup, a higher correct identification rate was observed in moderately high similarity lineups than in very high similarity lineups. When the culprit was absent, similarity did not yield a significant effect on innocent suspect misidentification rates. However, the correct rejection rate in the moderately high similarity lineup was 20% higher than in the very high similarity lineup. When choosing rates were controlled by calculating identification probabilities for only those who made a selection from the lineup, culprit identification rates as well as innocent suspect misidentification rates were significantly higher in the moderately high similarity lineup than in the very high similarity lineup. Thus, very high similarity fillers yielded costs and benefits. Although our research suggests that selecting the most similar fillers available may adversely affect correct identification rates, we recommend additional research using fillers obtained from police databases to corroborate our findings.
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