Timing Is Crucial For Creating Accurate Police Sketches From Eyewitness Descriptions

By Emma Young
A witness to a crime has to describe the offender’s face in as much detail as they can before they work with a police expert to create a visual likeness — a “facial composite”, sometimes called a photo-fit, or e-fit. But the way this is typically handled in police stations could be reducing the accuracy of these images, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
There have been concerns that the process of describing facial features might create a so-called “verbal overshadowing” that interferes with the visual memories of the offender. Recent work had suggested that waiting half an hour before starting on the composite should allow this predicted over-shadowing to fade away, and so make for a better composite. However, the new research, led by Charity Brown at the University of Leeds, has found that in more real-world situations, a delay actually makes things worse.

In the first of three studies, the team split 96 participants who reported being totally unfamiliar with the UK TV soap EastEnders into eight different experimental conditions. Each participant watched a brief video clip that featured two of a total of 12 actors from the programme. They were asked to focus either on the content of the conversation (to simulate the kind of incidental facial information that an eyewitness might gather when they don’t realise that they are actually witnessing a crime) or to focus on the faces....

Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - December 16, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Faces Memory Source Type: blogs