The wildcard: A simple technique for improving children's target‐absent lineup performance

Abstract

We attempted to increase children's willingness to reject target-absent lineups by making identification and rejection response procedures highly comparable. Eight-to eleven-year-old children (N ¼ 159) were briefly exposed to a confederate in the context of a staged event, and 24-48 hours later completed either a target-present or target-absent photographic lineup task. Within each lineup condition, children were either told to tell the experimenter if the target was not present (control condition), or provided with an additional photograph of a silhouetted figure with a large question mark superimposed (wildcard condition), and asked to point to this photograph if the target was not present. The wildcard increased children's accuracy on the target-absent lineup without affecting their target-present performance. In fact, performance was increased to a point at which target-absent and target-present accuracy did not differ significantly. These findings offer a promising, easilyimplemented intervention for reducing children's eyewitness identification errors.

Are children less reliable at making visual identifications than adults? A review

“…They called this silhouette the 'wildcard' and asked children (aged 8Á11 years) to point to this special photo if they did not see the person in the lineup. Zajac and Karageorge (2009) found in the control condition, correct rejections were made on 46 percent of occasions, however, when there was the option of the wildcard, correct rejections were made 71 percent of the time. Using the wildcard also did not reduce correct identifications when the target was present in the array.…”

“…One study that has successfully reduced false identifications using an additional option was conducted by Zajac and Karageorge (2009). They used a simultaneous photo array where a silhouette with a question mark was placed between two rows of three cards.…”

“…A number of techniques have been investigated by researchers in an attempt to reduce false identifications for child witnesses they include; sequential lineups Parker & Ryan, 1993;Pozzulo & Lindsay, 1998), elimination lineups (Humphries et al, 2012;Pozzulo & Balfour, 2006;Pozzulo, Dempsey, & Gascoigne, 2009;Pozzulo & Lindsay, 1999), practice lineups (Goodman, Bottoms, Schwarz-Kenney, & Rudy, 1991;Parker & Ryan, 1993), and providing an additional response (Beal et al, 1995;Davies, Tarrant, & Flin, 1989;Dunlevy & Cherryman, 2013;Havard & Memon, 2013;Karageorge & Zajac, 2011;Zajac & Karageorge, 2009). The various methods will now be described in more detail below.…”

“…Therefore, when making a correct identification for a lineup the response is positive, whereas when making a correct rejection the response is negative. It has been suggested that children view positive responses as being more favourable than giving a negative response (Zajac & Karageorge, 2009), and that giving an answer is preferable to not giving any answer (Waterman, Blades, & Spencer, 2000). Pozzulo and Lindsay (1998) offer an alternative explanation for why children make more false identifications for target absent lineups as compared to adults.…”

“…However, there is an own age bias in face identification, where people are better at recognising faces that are a similar age to themselves (for a recent review and meta-analysis please see Rhodes & Anastasi, 2012). Therefore, as most studies have used a young adult target in their mid-20s (Beresford & Blades, 2006;Dekle et al, 1996;Parker & Carranza, 1989;Parker & Ryan, 1993;Zajac & Karageorge, 2009) this immediately puts children at a slight disadvantage, when it comes to making an identification. One study that looked at the own age bias with child witnesses (aged 6Á8 years) found that correct rejection rates were higher for the similar aged child target (59%), as compared to the adult target (20%), and these rates were more comparable to correct rejection rates made by adult witnesses (Havard, Memon, Laybourn, & Cunningham, 2012).…”