Publications by authors named "Ryan J Fitzgerald"

Attending to the behaviors of eyewitnesses at police lineups could help to determine whether an eyewitness identification is accurate or mistaken. Eyewitness identification decision processes were explored using augmented reality holograms. Children (n = 143; Mage = 10.

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When presented with a lineup, the witness is tasked with identifying the culprit or indicating that the culprit is not present. The witness then qualifies the decision with a confidence judgment. But how do witnesses go about making these decisions and judgments? According to absolute-judgment models, witnesses determine which lineup member provides the strongest match to memory and base their identification decision and confidence judgment on the absolute strength of this MAX lineup member.

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Border control officers may be on the lookout for wanted people while they verify that travellers match their passport photos. We developed a novel experimental paradigm to investigate whether people are more likely to report that someone is wanted if they also believe that person is using a fraudulent passport. In two experiments, undergraduate students assumed the role of a border control officer and completed multiple "shifts" of a face matching task designed to simulate a passport verification check.

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Objective: The risk of mistaken identification for innocent suspects in lineups can be estimated by correcting the overall error rate by the number of people in the lineup. We compared this nominal size correction to a new effective size correction, which adjusts the error rate for the number of plausible lineup members.

Hypotheses: We hypothesized that (a) increasing lineup bias would increase misidentifications of a designated innocent suspect; (b) with the effective size correction, increasing lineup bias would also increase the estimate of innocent-suspect misidentifications; and (c) with the nominal size correction, lineup bias would have no effect on the estimate of innocent-suspect misidentifications.

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When administering sequential lineups, researchers often inform their participants that only their first yes response will count. This instruction differs from the original sequential lineup protocol and from how sequential lineups are conducted in practice. Participants (N = 896) viewed a videotaped mock crime and viewed a simultaneous lineup, a sequential lineup with a first-yes-counts instruction, or a sequential control lineup (with no first-yes-counts instruction); the lineup was either target-present or target-absent.

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Repeated events are common in everyday life, but relatively neglected as a topic within memory psychology. In two samples of adults, we investigated memory for repeated, schema-establishing simple events (operationalised as structured word-lists), and the effects of deviations within those events. We focused on the effects of deviations from two core dimensions of schema: content and order.

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When children report abuse, they often report that it occurred repeatedly. In most jurisdictions, children will be asked to report each instance of abuse with as many details as possible. In the current meta-analysis, we analyzed data from 31 experiments and 3099 children.

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The medium used to present lineup members for eyewitness identification varies according to the location of the criminal investigation. Although in some jurisdictions live lineups remain the default procedure, elsewhere this practice has been replaced with photo or video lineups. This divergence leads to two possibilities: Either some jurisdictions are not using the lineup medium that best facilitates accurate eyewitness identification or the lineup medium has no bearing on the accuracy of eyewitness identification.

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The suspect in eyewitness lineups may be guilty or innocent. These possibilities are traditionally simulated in eyewitness identification studies using a dual-lineup paradigm: All witnesses observe the same perpetrator and then receive one of two lineups. In this paradigm, the suspect's guilt is manipulated by including the perpetrator in one lineup and an innocent suspect in the other.

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We tested whether an alternative lineup procedure designed to minimize problematic influences (e.g., metacognitive development) on decision criteria could be effectively used by children and improve child eyewitness identification performance relative to a standard identification task.

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In 2 experiments, we introduce a new "face-off" procedure for child eyewitness identifications. The new procedure, which is premised on reducing the stimulus set size, was compared with the showup and simultaneous procedures in Experiment 1 and with modified versions of the simultaneous and elimination procedures in Experiment 2. Several benefits of the face-off procedure were observed: it was significantly more diagnostic than the showup procedure; it led to significantly more correct rejections of target-absent lineups than the simultaneous procedures in both experiments, and it led to greater information gain than the modified elimination and simultaneous procedures.

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Lineup identifications are often a critical component of criminal investigations. Over the past 35 years, researchers have been conducting empirical studies to assess the impact of witness age on identification accuracy. A previous meta-analysis indicated that children are less likely than adults to correctly reject a lineup that does not contain the culprit, but children 5 years and older are as likely as adults to make a correct identification if the culprit is in the lineup (Pozzulo & Lindsay, 1998).

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Eyewitness lineups typically contain a suspect (guilty or innocent) and fillers (known innocents). The degree to which fillers should resemble the suspect is a complex issue that has yet to be resolved. Previously, researchers have voiced concern that eyewitnesses would be unable to identify their target from a lineup containing highly similar fillers; however, our literature review suggests highly similar fillers have only rarely been shown to have this effect.

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Eyewitnesses to events with multiple actors might be aware that during a subsequent investigation some actors will need to be remembered and others can be forgotten. Research on the directed-forgetting procedure suggests that when some information is cued to be forgotten, retention of other information is enhanced. In three experiments, directed-forgetting conditions were compared with control conditions to assess potential costs and benefits of forgetting other-race faces.

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A face viewed under good encoding conditions is more likely to be remembered than a face viewed under poor encoding conditions. In four experiments we investigated how encoding conditions affected confidence in recognising faces from line-ups. Participants performed a change detection task followed by a recognition task and then rated how confident they were in their recognition accuracy.

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