Joyce E. Humphries

Intoxicated witnesses and suspects: an archival analysis of their involvement in criminal case processing

Research about intoxicated witnesses and criminal suspects is surprisingly limited, considering the police believe that they are quite ubiquitous. In the present study, we assessed the involvement of intoxicated witnesses and suspects in the investigation of rape, robbery, and assault crimes by analyzing cases that were referred by the police to a prosecutors office. Results indicated that intoxicated witnesses and suspects played an appreciable role in criminal investigations: Intoxicated witnesses were just as likely as sober ones to provide a description of the culprit and to take an identification test, suggesting criminal investigators treat intoxicated and sober witnesses similarly. Moreover, intoxicated suspects typically admitted to the police that they had consumed alcohol and/or drugs, and they were usually arrested on the same day as the crime. This archival analysis highlights the many ways in which alcohol impacts testimony during criminal investigations and underscores the need for additional research to investigate best practices for obtaining testimony from intoxicated witnesses and suspects.

An Examination of Criminal Face Bias in a Random Sample of Police Lineups

Faces with a stereotypic criminal appearance are remembered better and identified more often than other faces according to past research. In the present project, a random sample of police lineups was evaluated using the mock witness paradigm to determine whether criminal appearance was associated with lineup choices. In Study 1, mock witnesses were either provided with a description of the culprit or they were not. Participants also self-reported why they had selected a given face. In Study 2, the line-up faces were rated with respect to criminal appearance, distinctiveness, typicality and physical similarity. Criminal appearance was the primary reason self-reported for face selection in the no description condition. Mock witness choices in the no description condition were associated with only criminal appearance. When provided with a description, mock witnesses based their choice on the description. These findings are discussed in relation to lineup fairness.

The Effects of Alcohol Intoxication on Accuracy and the Confidence-Accuracy Relationship in Photographic Simultaneous Line-ups: Alcohol and line-up identification

Summary Acute alcohol intoxication during encoding can impair subsequent identification accuracy, but results across studies have been inconsistent, with studies often finding no effect. Little is also known about how alcohol intoxication affects the identification confidence–accuracy relationship. We randomly assigned women (N = 153) to consume alcohol (dosed to achieve a 0.08% blood alcohol content) or tonic water, controlling for alcohol expectancy. Women then participated in an interactive hypothetical sexual assault scenario and, 24 hours or 7 days later, attempted to identify the assailant from a perpetrator present or a perpetrator absent simultaneous line‐up and reported their decision confidence. Overall, levels of identification accuracy were similar across the alcohol and tonic water groups. However, women who had consumed tonic water as opposed to alcohol identified the assailant with higher confidence on average. Further, calibration analyses suggested that confidence is predictive of accuracy regardless of alcohol consumption. The theoretical and applied implications of our results are discussed.© 2017 The Authors Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Cognitive operations on space and their impact on the precision of location memory.

Learning about object locations in space usually involves the summation of information from different experiences of that space and requires various cognitive operations to make this possible. These processes are poorly understood and, in the extreme, may not occur--leading to mutual exclusivity of memories (Baguley, Lansdale, Lines, & Parkin, 2006). In this article, we investigate how the precision of location memory--evident in near-miss errors in recall--is related to different transformational processes in spatial cognition. Analyzing errors and latencies in a sequential comparative judgment task, 4 experiments show that the precision with which location is represented in memory is specifically degraded by a subset of transformations in which an object location encoded in reference to 1 anchor point is recalibrated in relation to another. We discuss the general implications of this finding for spatial learning and demonstrate that, rather than being a special case, exclusivity in memory is the extreme expression of a rational trade-off between the benefit of combining spatial information from more than 1 memory and the reduced precision that follows from the transformations required.

The own-race bias in child and adolescent witnesses: Evidence from video line-ups

This study investigated the own-race bias in British school children using an eyewitness paradigm. Some 319 participants viewed films of two similar staged thefts, one that depicted a Caucasian culprit and the other an Asian culprit, and then after a delay of 2–3 days, viewed a line-up for each culprit. One hundred and seventy-six of the participants were Caucasian and 143 were Asian. There were also two age groups: 164 were aged 7–9 years and 152 were 12–14 years. There was a significant own-race bias for Caucasian participants from both age groups that resulted in more correct identifications for the own-race culprit from target present line-ups and more false identifications for the target absent line-ups. Asian participants from both age groups showed no own-race bias and performed equally accurately for culprits of both races. Measures of inter-racial contact were associated with correct responses for other-race targets and revealed that the majority of Caucasian participants in the current sample had very little contact with Asians, whereas the majority of Asian participants had high levels of contact with Caucasians.

Age-related differences in spontaneous trait judgments from facial appearance.

We tested whether there are age-related declines in detecting cues to trustworthiness, a skill that has been demonstrated to be rapid and automatic in younger adults. Young (Mage = 21.2 years) and older (Mage = 70.15 years) adults made criminal appearance judgments to unfamiliar faces, which were presented at a duration of 100, 500 or 1,000 ms. Participants’ response times and judgment confidence were recorded. Older were poorer than young adults at judging trustworthiness at 100 ms, and were slower overall in making their judgments. Further, the cues (i.e. perceptions of anger, trustworthiness and happiness) underlying criminality judgments were the same across age groups. Judgment confidence increased with increasing exposure duration for both age groups, while older adults were less confident in their judgments overall than their young counterparts. The implications are discussed.

An examination of criminal face bias in a random sample of police lineups

Faces with a stereotypic criminal appearance are remembered better and identified more often than other faces according to past research. In the present project, a random sample of police lineups was evaluated using the mock witness paradigm to determine whether criminal appearance was associated with lineup choices. In Study 1, mock witnesses were either provided with a description of the culprit or they were not. Participants also self-reported why they had selected a given face. In Study 2, the line-up faces were rated with respect to criminal appearance, distinctiveness, typicality and physical similarity. Criminal appearance was the primary reason self-reported for face selection in the no description condition. Mock witness choices in the no description condition were associated with only criminal appearance. When provided with a description, mock witnesses based their choice on the description. These findings are discussed in relation to lineup fairness.