Eyewitness Testimony Research

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Gender Difference and Line Up Procedure of Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness testimony is the most common form of evidence in criminal cases and it has extreme important influence on many aspects of the conviction for criminal. Every year, approximately 77,000 suspects are identified by eyewitnesses in American trials (Denholtz, T. L., & McDonough, E. A., 2015). After a century of researching on eyewitness identification testimony, psychologists have reached a consensus that eyewitness testimony error is the leading cause for false conviction. Researches have showed that among witnesses who made an identification under the experimental situation, 36% identified a known-innocent filler rather than a suspect, indicating that eyewitness performance …show more content…
In Einat Levy-Gigi and Eli Vakil’s study, researchers examined the suggestibility effect of eyewitness testimony by examining the complex relationship between the conceptual and perceptual similarity of two events and memory distortion (Levy-Gigi, E., & Vakil, E., 2014). Another research focused on simultaneous or sequential photo lineups, showed that the sequential procedure produced a significantly lower rate of identifying known-innocent lineup fillers than did the simultaneous procedure, which means that sequential procedure that is used in the field reduces the identification of known-innocent fillers, and is more effective than simultaneous procedure (Wells, Gary L.; Steblay, Nancy K.; Dysart, Jennifer E, 2015). Annelies Vredeveldta and James D. Sauerb found that eye-closure reduced the distraction of external information influence during eyewitness testimony and increased the accuracy without significantly inflating self-confidence of the witness (Annelies Vredeveldta, James D. Sauerb, 2015). The study on mugshot exposure suggested a transference effect that mugshot exposure both significantly decreased the proportion of correct identification and increased the false alarm rate (Deffenbacher, K. A., Bornstein, B. H., & Penrod, S. D., 2006). For age difference, there is a crucial influence of developmental and aging process, which

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