The diagnostic feature-detection theory (DFT) of eyewitness identification is based on facial information that is diagnostic versus non-diagnostic of suspect guilt. It primarily has been tested by discounting non-diagnostic information at retrieval, typically by surrounding a single suspect showup with good fillers to create a lineup. We tested…

Many crimes occur in which a perpetrator has a distinctive facial feature, such as a tattoo or black eye, but few eyewitness identification (ID) studies have involved such a feature. We conducted an experiment to determine how eyewitness ID performance is impacted by a distinctive facial feature, and how police could deal with this issue.…

Few studies have investigated eyewitnesses' ability to predict their later lineup performance, known as "predecision confidence." We applied calibration analysis in two experiments comparing predecision confidence (immediately after encoding but prior to a lineup) to postdecision confidence (immediately after a lineup) to determine which…

It is important to consider the two parameters of signal detection theory, discriminability and response bias, when evaluating eyewitness identification from simultaneous lineups. On the basis of the diagnostic feature-detection hypothesis, we tested a method for increasing discriminability that encourages eyewitnesses to carefully rank each…