Significance
Thomas Albright
Edited by Thomas Albright, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA; received March 1, 2023; accepted July 2, 2023Incorrect lineup identification decisions have devastating consequences on the wrongfully accused and for society when guilty perpetrators remain at large. This paper heeds the call by the National Academy of Sciences to utilize technology to increase correct identifications and minimize incorrect identifications. We found that the simultaneous interactive lineup procedure, which allows witnesses to actively explore the lineup members’ faces, increases discriminability compared to traditionally used video and simultaneous photo lineups. Interactive lineups were beneficial regardless of perpetrator encoding viewpoint (i.e., front or profile). In the real world, eyewitnesses may view a perpetrator from multiple perspectives. The interactive procedure allows witnesses to adjust face viewpoints to match their memory of the crime, which may be beneficial for memory retrieval.Accurate witness identification is a cornerstone of police inquiries and national security investigations. However, witnesses can make errors. We experimentally tested whether an interactive lineup, a recently introduced procedure that enables witnesses to dynamically view and explore faces from different angles, improves the rate at which witnesses identify guilty over innocent suspects compared to procedures traditionally used by law enforcement. Participants encoded 12 target faces, either from the front or in profile view, and then attempted to identify the targets from 12 lineups, half of which were target present and the other half target absent. Participants were randomly assigned to a lineup condition: simultaneous interactive, simultaneous photo, or sequential video. In the front-encoding and profile-encoding conditions, Receiver Operating Characteristics analysis indicated that discriminability was higher in interactive compared to both photo and video lineups, demonstrating the benefit of actively exploring the lineup members’ faces. Signal-detection modeling suggested interactive lineups increase discriminability because they afford the witness the opportunity to view more diagnostic features such that the nondiagnostic features play a proportionally lesser role. These findings suggest that eyewitness errors can be reduced using interactive lineups because they create retrieval conditions that enable witnesses to actively explore faces and more effectively sample features.Eyewitness identification is a cornerstone of police inquiries and national security investigations. However, mistaken identification has been implicated in about 70% of U.S. wrongful convictions (Nevertheless, the technology used to conduct identifications has not fundamentally changed over the past century. The static 2D photo lineup is the most widely used procedure worldwide (A large body of research dedicated to improving discriminability has accumulated. In laboratory studies, participant witnesses are shown a mock crime and tested under different lineup conditions. Many studies have compared sequential to simultaneous lineups, wherein, respectively, witnesses view the members one at a time versus all together. In research comparing simultaneous to sequential lineups, some studies have found discriminability is higher in simultaneous lineups (e.g., ref. Laboratory research has also examined video lineups, which are used in the U.K. and presented sequentially (In this study, we heed the National Academy of Sciences call for technology to improve discriminability (Discriminability should theoretically be higher in interactive compared to existing procedures since witnesses can engage in Drawing on the theory and research outlined above, Colloff et al. (