The effect of pre-event instructions on eyewitness identification

• Autor(a) principal: Baldassari, Mario
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Moore, Kara N., Hyman, Ira E., Hope, Lorraine, Mah, Eric Y., Lindsay, D. Stephen, Mansour, Jamal, Saraiva, Renan, Horry, Ruth, Rath, Hannah, Kelly, Lauren, Jones, Rosie, Vale, Shannan, Lawson, Bethany, Pedretti, Josh, Palma, Tomás, Cruz, Francisco, Quarenta, Joana, Van der Cruyssen, Ine, Mileva, Mila, Allen, Jessica, Jeye, Brittany, Wiechert, Sera
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/62324
• topic: Eyewitness identifcation; Lineup; Study instructions; Eyewitness memory

Research on eyewitness identifcation often involves exposing participants to a simulated crime and later testing memory using a lineup. We conducted a systematic review showing that pre-event instructions, instructions given before event exposure, are rarely reported and those that are reported vary in the extent to which they warn participants about the nature of the event or tasks. At odds with the experience of actual witnesses, some studies use preevent instructions explicitly warning participants of the upcoming crime and lineup task. Both the basic and applied literature provide reason to believe that pre-event instructions may afect eyewitness identifcation performance. In the current experiment, we tested the impact of pre-event instructions on lineup identifcation decisions and confdence. Participants received non-specifc pre-event instructions (i.e., “watch this video”) or eyewitness pre-event instructions (i.e., “watch this crime video, you’ll complete a lineup later”) and completed a culprit-absent or -present lineup. We found no support for the hypothesis that participants who receive eyewitness pre-event instructions have higher discriminability than participants who receive non-specifc pre-event instructions. Additionally, confdenceaccuracy calibration was not signifcantly diferent between conditions. However, participants in the eyewitness condition were more likely to see the event as a crime and to make an identifcation than participants in the non-specifc condition. Implications for conducting and interpreting eyewitness identifcation research and the basic research on instructions and attention are discussed.