Face-off: A new identification procedure for child eyewitnesses.

Abstract

In 2 experiments, we introduce a new "face-off" procedure for child eyewitness identifications. The new procedure, which is premised on reducing the stimulus set size, was compared with the showup and simultaneous procedures in Experiment 1 and with modified versions of the simultaneous and elimination procedures in Experiment 2. Several benefits of the face-off procedure were observed: it was significantly more diagnostic than the showup procedure; it led to significantly more correct rejections of target-absent lineups than the simultaneous procedures in both experiments, and it led to greater information gain than the modified elimination and simultaneous procedures. The face-off procedure led to consistently more conservative responding than the simultaneous procedures in both experiments. Given the commonly cited concern that children are too lenient in their decision criteria for identification tasks, the face-off procedure may offer a concrete technique to reduce children's high choosing rates. (PsycINFO Database Record

A Repeated Forced‐choice Line‐up Procedure Provides Suspect Bias Information with No Cost to Accuracy for Older Children and Adults

“…One way to maintain the advantage of repeated choosing but mitigate the risk of a commitment effect is by ensuring that all line‐up members are presented an equal number of times. Prior to development of the recent face‐off procedure (Price & Fitzgerald, ), no line‐up researcher to our knowledge has utilized a two‐alternative forced‐choice model to measure eyewitness accuracy.…”

“…With the RFC procedure, witnesses are shown several pairs of line‐up members and are told that, out of all of the pairs they will be shown, only one person may (or may not be) the target person. To adjust for this, instructions were adapted from previous developmental line‐up work (e.g., elimination line‐up, Pozzulo & Lindsay, ; face‐off procedure, Price & Fitzgerald, ). When shown each pair, witnesses are asked, ‘Which of these two looks MOST like the person you saw?’ This contrasts with a traditional alternative forced‐choice model in which each pair contains one of multiple targets and participants are asked, ‘Which of these two faces is the one you saw’ Although the task is similar, the focus for participants is quite different in these two task (which is most similar versus which is the one you saw) that may produce rather different results than what has been observed in the facial recognition literature (i.e., superior recognition accuracy with forced choice).…”

“…In a recent study introducing the face‐off line‐up procedure with school‐aged children (aged 6 to 15 years old), Price and Fitzgerald () found that reducing the stimulus set size to a series of pairs improved the accuracy of children's responding in TA line‐ups, relative to the simultaneous procedure. However, there was some evidence that this TA benefit may come at a cost to correct choosing from the target‐present (TP) line‐ups.…”

“…In the present study, we compared the RFC procedure with the face‐off procedure (Price & Fitzgerald, ) and the simultaneous procedure. Both the RFC and face‐off procedures present line‐up members in pairs and, as such, both procedures were expected to produce more accurate responding than the simultaneous procedure.…”

“…Two experiments and a supplementary model development analyses were conducted. In experiment 1, we compared children's (aged 6 to 11 years) performance on the RFC procedure with two other line‐up procedures: the well‐established simultaneous procedure with wildcard (all line‐up members shown at once) that has become a standard procedure in the child eyewitness literature against which new procedures are compared (e.g., Zajac & Karageorge, ; Price & Fitzgerald, ) and the recent face‐off procedure (Price & Fitzgerald, ). Given that children are frequently tested on simultaneous procedures (cf.…”