Court instructions and public perception endorse that eyewitness evidence provided by police should weight more heavily than laypeople's in court. Evidence is inconsistent. The current experiment provides a nuanced analysis of identification performance of police and laypeople at different levels of confidence. Laypeople and advanced police…

Person descriptions often lack the level of detail necessary to assist in the apprehension of a perpetrator. To date, it is not clear how person descriptions are obtained by frontline police officers. Worldwide, many police forces now use body worn video (BWV), which provides a unique opportunity to examine how frontline police officers gather…

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.…

Threat detection is an important skill for police officers, but few studies have examined the impact of processing strategies on this ability. The first aim of our study was to compare the visual detection of threatening and neutral targets in 38 police trainees and 53 police officers. The other aims were to examine the effect of emotional or…

Forty French gendarmes from the "Gendarmerie Nationale," and 40 laypersons completed two experiments to assess how they make inferences from testimonies. The first experiment targeted how inferences are made when the critical information on which a judgment has to be made is explicitly stated in the testimony or it is implicit and has to…

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…

Sex disparities in the incidence-arrest statistics for juvenile thieves may stem from preconceived stereotypes impacting bystanders' social-cognitive processing of a bicycle theft. After reading vignettes describing a bicycle theft, bystanders' reliance on male-as-juvenile-thief stereotypes enhanced their recall of crime and appearance features…

Research has begun to investigate the reliability of cannabis-intoxicated eyewitnesses; however, no studies have evaluated eyewitness memory among chronic cannabis users after a minimum 24-h abstinence. This study compared cannabis users' (n = 23) and nonusers' (n = 26) eyewitness recall/identification and investigated the relationship between…

Confirmation bias is a universal characteristic of human cognition, with consequences for information processing and reasoning in everyday situations as well as in professional work such as forensic interviewing. Cognitive measures such as general intelligence are also related to personality traits, but there is a lack of research on personality…

Recent research has shown that incorrect statements in eyewitness testimonies contain more cues to effortful memory retrieval than correct statements. In two experiments, we attempted to improve judgments of testimony accuracy by informing participants about these effort cues. Participants read eyewitness testimony transcripts and judged statement…

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…

This study examined the quality of forensic interviews conducted by specially trained police officers in the Norwegian Barnahus between 2015 and 2017, using the sequential interview (SI) model, a Norwegian version of the extended interview model that has not previously been studied. Two hundred and seven interviews of alleged abused preschool…

A common belief in police officers is that guilty suspects' statements are less consistent than innocent suspects'. This could leave guilty suspects more vulnerable to missing inconsistencies externally induced into their alibis. Source monitoring and cognitive load approaches suggest that untruthfulness rather than guilt should predict proneness…

Years of psychological research has demonstrated that the use of investigative interviewing methods based on up-to-date scientific evidence is important to ensure the reliability of child witnesses' statements. Ideally, professionals working with children are equipped with knowledge of memory functioning, as erroneous beliefs may impact how they…

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in people with superior face recognition skills. Yet identification of these individuals has mostly relied on criterion performance on a single attempt at a single measure of face memory. The current investigation aimed to examine the consistency of superior face recognition skills in 30 police…