The distance from which an eyewitness views a perpetrator is a critical factor for eyewitness identification, but has received little research attention. We presented three mock-crime videos to participants, varying distance to three perpetrators (3, 10, or 20 m). Across two experiments, increased distance reduced empirical discriminability in the…

Investigations of face identification have typically focussed on matching faces to photographic IDs. Few researchers have considered the task of searching for a face in a crowd. In Experiment 1, we created the Chokepoint Search Test to simulate real-time search for a target. Performance on this test was poor (39% accuracy) and showed moderate…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…