The effect of surgical masks on identification decisions from masked and unmasked lineups.

While research has shown that wearing a disguise hinders lineup identifications, less is known about how to conduct lineups in cases of disguised perpetrators. We examined the influence of surgical masks, worn during a crime event (encoding) and within lineups (retrieval), on eyewitness identification accuracy. In our experiment, 452 participants watched a mock-crime video and identified the perpetrator from either a target-present or a target-absent simultaneous lineup.

Transfer of Avatar Training Effects to Investigative Field Interviews of Children Conducted by Police Officers.

Previous research with students and some professional groups (psychologists) has demonstrated that repeated feedback in simulated investigative interviews with computerized child avatars improves the quality of interviews conducted with real children who have witnessed a mock event. However, it is not known whether this type of training would improve the quality of investigative interviews with actual child victims and witnesses of physical and sexual abuse. Twenty-two police investigators participated in the study.

Deception rate in a "lying game": different effects of excitatory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation of right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex not found with inhibitory stimulation.

Knowing the brain processes involved in lying is the key point in today's deception detection studies. We have previously found that stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) affects the rate of spontaneous lying in simple behavioural tasks. The main idea of this study was to examine the role of rTMS applied to the DLPFC in the behavioural conditions where subjects were better motivated to lie compared to our earlier studies and where all possible conditions (inhibition of left and right DLPFC with 1-Hz and sham; excitation of left and right DLPFC with 10-Hz and sham) were administered to the same subjects.