How do we know eyewitness statements of confidence are interpreted accurately by others? When eyewitnesses provide a verbal expression of confidence about a lineup identification, such as I'm fairly certain it's him, how well do others understand the intended meaning of this statement of confidence? And, how is this perception of the meaning influenced by justifications of the level of confidence, such as when eyewitnesses say, I remember his chin? The answers to these questions are unknown, as there is no research on how others interpret the intended meaning of eyewitness confidence. Three experiments show that an additional justification of confidence, relative to seeing a confidence statement alone, can increase misunderstanding in others' estimation of the meaning of the expression of confidence. Moreover, this justification-induced increase in misunderstanding only occurs when the justification refers to an observable facial feature and not when it refers to an unobservable quality (e.g., He is very familiar). Even more noteworthy, both Experiments 2 and 3 show that this featural justification effect is strongest when eyewitnesses express absolute certainty in an identification, such as by stating I am positive. When a highly confident assertion is accompanied by a featural justification others will be most likely to misinterpret the intended meaning.
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Improving the interpretation of verbal eyewitness confidence statements by distinguishing perceptions of certainty from those of accuracy.
J Exp Psychol Appl
September 2022
Department of Psychology.
When an eyewitness makes an identification from a lineup, police are also instructed to collect a verbal expression of confidence. This recommendation hinges on the assumption that evaluators will perceive confidence in the manner the witness intended. However, research has consistently shown that these interpretations can be biased by accompanying contextual information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActual vs. perceived eyewitness accuracy and confidence and the featural justification effect.
J Exp Psychol Appl
December 2018
Department of Psychology.
This article documents a contradiction between objective eyewitness accuracy and perceived eyewitness accuracy. Objectively, eyewitness identification accuracy (and the confidence-accuracy relationship) is comparably strong when a lineup identification is accompanied by a justification that refers to either an observable feature about the suspect ("I remember his eyes"), an unobservable feature ("He looks like a friend of mine") or just a statement of recognition ("I recognize him"). There is, however, a weaker relationship between confidence and accuracy and an increase in high confidence errors for identifications that are accompanied by references to familiarity than by references to any other type of justification.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMisinterpreting eyewitness expressions of confidence: The featural justification effect.
Law Hum Behav
June 2015
Department of Psychology.
How do we know eyewitness statements of confidence are interpreted accurately by others? When eyewitnesses provide a verbal expression of confidence about a lineup identification, such as I'm fairly certain it's him, how well do others understand the intended meaning of this statement of confidence? And, how is this perception of the meaning influenced by justifications of the level of confidence, such as when eyewitnesses say, I remember his chin? The answers to these questions are unknown, as there is no research on how others interpret the intended meaning of eyewitness confidence. Three experiments show that an additional justification of confidence, relative to seeing a confidence statement alone, can increase misunderstanding in others' estimation of the meaning of the expression of confidence. Moreover, this justification-induced increase in misunderstanding only occurs when the justification refers to an observable facial feature and not when it refers to an unobservable quality (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSimilarity, feature discovery, and the size principle.
Acta Psychol (Amst)
March 2010
University of Adelaide, SA, Australia.
In this paper we consider the "size principle" for featural similarity, which states that rare features should be weighted more heavily than common features in people's evaluations of the similarity between two entities. Specifically, it predicts that if a feature is possessed by n objects, the expected weight scales according to a 1/n law. One justification of the size principle emerges from a Bayesian analysis of simple induction problems (Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001), and is closely related to work by Shepard (1987) proposing universal laws for inductive generalization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeural feature abstraction from judgments of similarity.
Neural Comput
October 1998
Communications Division, Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Salisbury, South Australia.
The common neural network modeling practice of representing the elements of a task domain in terms of a set of features lacks justification if the features are derived through some form of ad hoc preabstraction. By examining a featural similarity model related to established multidimensional scaling techniques, a neural network is developed that generates features from similarity data and attaches weights to these features. The network performs a constrained search of a continuous solution space to determine the features and uses a previously developed regularization technique to minimize the number of features it derives.
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