Environmental context‐dependent eyewitness recognition

Abstract

The present study helped resolve the apparent conflict between many laboratory list-learning studies, which have not found environmental context-dependent recognition memory, and staged field studies (e.g. Malpass and Devine, 1981), whose results with 'guided memory' techniques suggest that eyewitness face recognition should depend upon environmental context reinstatement. It was found in two different experiments that, relative to testing in a new place, returning participants to the environment where a live staged event had occurred improved performance on identification of a confederate's face (i.e., hit rate). Although physical reinstatement improved identification performance in Experiment 1, mental reinstatement instructions to subjects tested in a new environment did not improve identification performance over an uninstructed group. The environmental reinstatement effect did not interact with test delay or confederate. In Experiment 2 it was found that environmental reinstatement improved accuracy (hit rate and foil identification rate) when the correct target was present in the test line-up, and that false identifications were not significantly affected by contextual manipulations when the correct target was absent from the line-up. The results provide an empirical basis for the hypothesis that returning to the scene of an event improves eyewitness face recognition.Does returning to the scene of an event enhance a witness' memory? The experimental literature related to this issue does not offer a clear answer about the mnemonic effects of returning to the scene of an event. List-learning studies of contextual reinstatement disagree, in general, with what might be predicted from the results of staged field studies concerning the effect of physical reinstatement of an environment on recognition memory. Studies using lists of words or other verbal materials (e.g. Smith, Glenberg, and Bjork, 1978;Godden and Baddeley, 1980) have typically found no effect of environmental manipulations on recognition memory. In apparent contrast, staged field studies have shown face recognition improvements from techniques which involve a composite of mental reinstatement strategies (e.g. Malpass and Devine, 1981;Krafka and Penrod, 1985), although these field studies have not directly tested environmental resintatement effects on eyewitness recognition. The present study was designed to provide empirical evidence relevant to the question of environmental context-dependent recognition memory, using live events staged and tested in live environmental contexts.The efficacy of context reinstatement procedures for improving eyewitness memory accuracy is an important issue for criminal investigations. Investigative leads for finding criminals and accurate identification of suspects are commonly believed to 08884080/92/020 125-1 5/$01.50

Effects of study time and meaningfulness on environmental context-dependent recognition

“…For instance, Dalton found place-context-dependent recognition of unfamiliar faces; Russo et al successfully replicated the place-context-dependent recognition of unfamiliar faces, and further found context-dependent recognition with nonwords but not with meaningful words. Moreover, various eyewitness memory studies have reported placecontext-dependent recognition of the unfamiliar faces of culprits (e.g., Krafka & Penrod, 1985;Malpass & Devine, 1981;Smith & Vela, 1992). Thus, these findings indicate a trend toward the probability of finding place-context-dependent recognition decreasing with increasing familiarity or meaningfulness of the materials.…”

“…More importantly, the unfamiliar or meaningless materials revealed large effect sizes of context-dependent recognition. The large effect size of recognition in the meta-analysis may thus have been caused by the data from the unfamiliar or meaningless materials (e.g., Dalton, 1993;Krafka & Penrod, 1985;Malpass & Devine, 1981;Smith & Vela, 1992) and from the problematic studies (e.g., Canas & Nelson, 1986;Smith, 1986).…”

The Effects of Witness Viewpoint Distance, Angle, and Choice on Eyewitness Accuracy in Police Lineups Conducted in Immersive Virtual Environments

“…For instance, two studies by Smith and Vela (1992) examined this issue by staging a memorable event and asking participants to identify the confederate while in the context in which the event took place or in a different context. The results revealed that recognition performance was better when the recognition task took place in the same place as the memorable event.…”

Eyewitness recognition errors: The effects of mugshot viewing and choosing in young and old adults

“…However, where many similar items are encountered on the test and where lures share many similarities with targets, still higher levels of environmental support might be required by seniors and, in some cases, by young adults as well (see Koutstaal & Schacter, 2002, for a review). Instructions designed to facilitate recall of original contextualcues can, on occasion, reduce false choosing in eyewitness tasks (Cutler, Penrod, & Martens, 1997;Gwyer & Clifford, 1997;Kraffka & Penrod, 1985;Malpass & Devine, 1981;Smith & Vela, 1992), although several studies report null effects (e.g., Fisher, Quigley, Brock, Chin, & Cutler, 1990;Searcy et al, 2001). In the present study, we manipulated environmental support by comparing a standard lineup condition with one in which participants were encouraged to recollect context and to base recollection on what they had seen in the video.…”