Face recognition and eyewitness identification have a long history of inaccuracy. Sporer (1996) recounted evidence of such an inaccuracy dating back to 1796 that had dire consequences. In France, four men robbed a stagecoach. Over the following ten years, eight men were tried and convicted of the crime. Six men were executed for the crime. One of those executed, turned out to be a bystander and a victim of the crime. Another was found to have been at his home at a dinner party at the time of the crime. Were the actual perpetrators of the crime punished for their actions? This was not a question asked by prosecutors of the early nineteenth century. However, this is a frequently asked question by the prosecutors of the twentieth century. The criminal justice system faces difficulty in prosecution of perpetrators because of identification.
The criminal justice system has several categories of employees. There are police who arrest or ticket for crime, lawyers who prosecute crime or defend against crime, judges who preside over the prosecution of crime, jurors who listen to the facts of a case and render a decision of guilt or innocence based on those facts, and many others. However, there are also a large number of unpaid participants in the prosecution of crime. The victim of the crime and the eyewitness to the crime are two of these.
One of the biggest aids to the criminal justice system in identification of perpetrators is the eyewitness. The eyewitness is crucial to most investigations of crime. Two questions are asked about eyewitness assistance. First, how accurate is the information of the eyewitness? And second, how credible is the witness? A number of things affect eyewitness credibility and accuracy.
The number one reason for false conviction and imprisonment is false identification. Traditionally, several safeguards have been used to attempt prevention of mistakenly arrested individuals from conviction of crimes they did not commit. Some of these safeguards include the presence of legal counsel during lineup, the cross-examination process, and specific judge's instructions. The common conclusion made by professionals is that traditional safeguards are ineffective against mistaken eyewitness identification. Expert testimony has shown greater promise against erroneous convictions. Expert testimony on eyewitness memory is designed to educate jurors about memory processes and eyewitness fallibility.
Other methods are also being investigated for assisting eyewitness recall and recognition, such as the cognitive interview, and specific judges instructions. However, investigation of the reasons why recognition is so poor is equally important to understanding of the problem.
People create the past based on information stored in memory, general knowledge, and the retrieval situation (Hyman & Loftus, 1998). Human memory for faces can be very good, but it can also be very limited (O'Toole, Peterson, & Deffenbacher, 1996). Recognition of a face is simply a decision of whether or not a face is known.
Face recognition is one of the most common and most important cognitive tasks of daily life (Doty, 1998). A variety of factors, including but not limited to emotionality (how the viewer is feeling at the time), weapon focus (a tendency to focus on the weapon instead of the face of the perpetrator), and various facial influences make facial features memorable. The salience of facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, facial hair), context information (where and when the episode occurred), distinctiveness, and changes in facial appearance are reviewed by Sarno and Alley (1997). Face recognition study is important because of its implications for eyewitness recognition and testimony (reviewed in Sporer, 1996).
One factor is emotionality. As the victim of or eyewitness of a crime, emotions such as fear, anger, indecision, and anxiety interfere with Cognitive processes. This is a very stressful event in an individual's life. Additionally, an eyewitness is not expecting for a crime to occur, and therefore is not attending to details of the situation. No instructor is standing behind the eyewitness telling them to pay attention in order to answer questions about the event later.
There is also a body of evidence about weapon focus that is if a weapon is used during the commission of a crime. Eyewitnesses in crimes where a weapon was used are able to describe the weapon used in the crime more accurately than the perpetrator due to this problem.
Even with all these other factors in mind, the most important person in the prosecution of perpetrators of crime is still the eyewitness. Frequently the eyewitness is the only evidence available to locate and prosecute criminals. Although traditional face recognition studies do not mimic all the factors that affect the eyewitness, they are important for isolation of the factors involved in face recognition. Accuracy in a face recognition study could mean further accuracy for the eyewitness.
Confidence of eyewitnesses is an area which researchers have found to have low correlation with accuracy. Confidence in judgment, scored by participant self-report, tends to be much higher than accuracy of judgment. However, it has been found that a correlation does exist for correct versus incorrect choosers in confidence levels. Overall confidence was higher for those who chose correctly, making a correct identification, than those who incorrectly chose.
REFERENCES
Doty, N. (1998). The influence of nationality on accuracy of face and voice recognition. American Journal of Psychology, 111, 191-214.
Hyman, I.E., & Loftus, E.F. (1998). Errors in autobiographical memory. Clinical Psychology Review, 18, 93-947.
O'Toole, A.J., Peterson, J., & Deffenbacher, K.A. (1996). An 'other-race effect' for categorizing faces by sex. Perception, 25, 669-676.
Sarno, J.A., & Alley, T.R. (1997). Attractiveness and the memorability of faces: Only a matter of distinctiveness? American Journal of Psychology, 110, 81-92.
Sporer, S.L. (1996). Introduction to eyewitness identification. Psychological Issues in Eyewitness Identification (3-12) Sporer, S.L., Malpass, R.S., & Koehnken, G. eds. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Cheryl L. McKinzie, M.S., M.A, LPCI http://www.McKinzieCounseling.com, Adolescent, & Individual Counseling
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