Are Traditional Lineups Flawed by Design?
Traditional lineups are suboptimal. While traditional lineups can rule in the guilty, they cannot rule out the innocent. Fortunately, the rule out procedure is the feasible and superior procedure.
The Rule Out Procedure: A Signal-Detection-Informed Approach to the Collection of Eyewitness Identification Evidence
Visual recognition memory has a remarkable capacity to discriminate between previously seen and novel items. Yet, research on eyewitness lineups suggests that memory is useful for detecting culprit presence, but less useful for detecting culprit absence. We show that this asymmetry is predicted by the equal-variance signal-detection model. When witnesses reject lineups, they provide a global confidence rating that none of the lineup members is the culprit. These ratings do not scale match-to-memory for the suspect and are low in diagnostic value. Consequently, the equal-variance signal-detection model predicts that a one-person showup will have better discriminability than a six-person lineup. A large-scale experiment (N = 3281) supported that prediction. However, a modified lineup in which participants were asked to follow categorical identification decisions by assigning a confidence rating to each lineup member had better discriminability than both the showup and the standard simultaneous lineup. We call this modified lineup the rule out procedure. Results also revealed a relatively weak confidence- accuracy relation for global rejections of lineups, but a much stronger confidence-accuracy relation for rejections of individual faces. Past failures to detect suspect innocence with lineups should be attributed to flawed design, not to limitations of visual recognition memory.
Smith, A. M., Ayala, N. T., & Ying, R. C. (2022). The Rule Out Procedure: A Signal-Detection-Informed Approach to the Collection of Eyewitness Identification Evidence. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law
The rule-out procedure: Increasing the potential for police investigators to detect suspect innocence from eyewitness lineup procedures.
When following scientific best-practice recommendations, the simultaneous lineup is effective at demonstrating guilt. The simultaneous lineup is less effective at demonstrating innocence. A critical problem is that when a witness identifies a filler or indicates the culprit is not present, confidence does not measure the strength of match between the suspect and the witness’s memory for the culprit. We propose a novel rule-out procedure as a potential remedy. After making an identification decision and expressing their confidence, participants indicated for each person they did not identify, how confident they were this personwas notthe culprit. The rule-out procedure better discriminated guilty suspects from innocent suspects than did the simultaneous lineup. This improvement was strictly attributable to increased potential to rule out the innocent. Interestingly, both witnesses who made rejections and witnesses who mistakenly identified fillers possessed additional memorial information that was useful for ruling out the innocent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Ayala, N. T., Smith, A. M., & Ying, R. C. (2022). The rule out procedure: Increasing the potential for police investigators to detect suspect innocence from eyewitness lineup procedures. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000018
Do Traditional Lineups Undermine the Capacity for Eyewitness Memory to Rule Out Innocent Suspects?
Comments on an article by Neil Brewer and James Doyle (see record 2021-19175-001). In their target article, Brewer and Doyle (2021) called on those with an interest in eyewitness identification to: (1) broadly consider alternative measurement models to that of the traditional eyewitness lineup, and (2) to specifically consider a ratings-based identification procedure that Brewer and his colleagues began developing more than a decade ago (Brewer et al., 2012, 2020; Sauer et al., 2008; Sauer et al., 2012). The commenting authors believe Brewer and Doyle's call to seriously consider the ratings-based procedure as an alternative to the traditional lineup is premature. Despite the commenting authors belief, there are reasons to believe that the ratings-based procedure could ultimately prove superior to the traditional lineup. In the current commentary, the authors review both the traditional eyewitness lineup procedure and the ratings-based procedure and argue that, in theory, the ratings-based procedure is a better measurement model than is the traditional lineup procedure. The commenting authors then present the results of a simulation in which they compared Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for both the ratings-based procedure and the traditional lineup to the optimal ROC curve for a fixed level of memory strength. The results of this simulation reveal that the traditional lineup—but not the ratings-based procedure— seriously undermines the capacity for eyewitness memory to rule out innocent suspects from police suspicion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Smith, A. M., & Ayala, N. T. (2021). Do traditional lineups undermine the capacity for eyewitness memory to rule out innocent suspects? Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 10(2), 215–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2021.03.003