Abstract
Adolescent eyewitnesses have not been adequately studied. This is problematic given that adolescents are at a heightened risk to be an eyewitness or victim to crime. As a first step in studying adolescent eyewitnesses, the current experiment examined adolescents’ (15- to 18-year-old’s; N = 470) performance on four lineup procedures—simultaneous, sequential, elimination, wildcard—to determine which resulted in the greatest discriminability. Given that police agencies use different methods for selecting fillers in the real world (Police Executive Research Forum 2013), filler similarity was manipulated in order to test the lineups in a more legally realistic manner. Thus, lineups either contained lower or higher similarity fillers. Using d’ as a measure of discriminability, results identified that the wildcard and simultaneous lineups led to the greatest discriminability, while the sequential lineup led to the lowest discriminability. Although the results do not suggest a clear superiority of one lineup procedure over another, what the results do suggest is that the sequential lineup may be the least advantageous to use with adolescents and the wildcard and simultaneous lineups may be the most advantageous.
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Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Notes
Both Pozzulo et al. (2013) and Sheahan et al. (2017) did not report the innocent suspect identification rate, instead, they reported the false identification rate which included filler and innocent suspect identifications. In order to calculate d’, the false identification rate for each lineup was divided by the number of lineup members (i.e., 6 in both studies).
In the current study, a false positive occurred when an eyewitness identified the innocent suspect from a culprit-absent lineup and a true positive occurred when an eyewitness identified the guilty suspect (i.e., the culprit) from a culprit-present lineup.
ROC curves could not be constructed in the current study as there were too few data points.
G could not be calculated for the wildcard high versus low similarity comparison because there were no innocent suspect identifications made in the low similarity lineup.
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Thompson, L.E., Pozzulo, J., Fraser, B.M. et al. The Impact of Procedure and Filler Similarity on Adolescent Eyewitness Lineup Performance. J Police Crim Psych 38, 437–451 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-022-09531-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-022-09531-9