Recently, the field of eyewitness identification has undergone a radical transformation, using signal-detection theory, models, and associated analyses to answer the important applied question of how police should test a witness’s memory of a criminal perpetrator. Here, we used these analytical techniques and the basic science of face memory to examine how encoding view influences the information that is stored in and retrieved from memory during an eyewitness identification task. Participants watched a simulated crime and we varied the angle from which they viewed the perpetrator. In Experiment 1, participants (N=2,904) were tested with a static photo lineup; the viewing angle of the lineup members was the same or different from the perpetrator at encoding. In Experiment 2, participants (N=1,430) were tested with a novel interactive lineup in which they could rotate the lineup faces into any angle. In both experiments, discrimination accuracy was greater when the viewing angle at encoding and test matched. Interestingly, participants also naturally reinstated the angle of the interactive faces to match their encoding angle. Our results highlight the importance of encoding specificity for eyewitness identification, and reveal that people actively seek out information in the testing environment that matches the study environment to aid memory retrieval. Our study demonstrates how memory findings and analytical techniques from the basic science literature can enhance our understanding of applied eyewitness memory processes, and ultimately reduce memory errors that can have devastating consequences in the real world.
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