Summary to be provided by Sean
Verbal Descriptions of Faces From Memory: Are They Diagnostic of Identification Accuracy?
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TrackBack URL: http://www.psychologicalscience.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/185
TrackBack URL: http://www.psychologicalscience.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/185
I found this topic to be interesting. This article caught my attention right away when it was started to talk about how the quality of an eyewitness’s description of a face is linked to the eyewitnesses following lineup identification accuracy. An accurate description of a face was said to be correlated with an accuracy of subsequent identification. At first I believed this theory to be true as I thought of examples such as how it seemed reasonable that if someone is able to put forth verbal descriptions and detail, it may be due to the fact they had a good/clear look at the suspect and therefore were able to give a more accurate description.
The study done by Gary Wells seemed to be somewhat consistent with this theory. Although I did not fully understand the type of correlation mentioned(point-biserial correlation), for the most part I understood the results. There was a relationship found between the accuracy in the witness’s description and the subsequent identification accuracy of the witness. The relationship occurred because better described faces had the better identification…although these findings are somewhat debatable.
There have been previous studies that do not agree with these findings. Some say that just because someone is good at describing memorized details of the face doesn’t mean that they are noticeably good at recognizing faces. Some people are just better at face description and others at identification. The article went on to give reasons why the relationship between verbal description and identification is false. For instance, verbal processes are said to play little part in encoding faces, and verbal descriptions have a different retrieval cue than identification. Identification is recognition, and descriptions are recall. This information got me questioning what I initially had thought to be true about this relationship. I think it would be a good idea to do further studies on the actual process of descriptions and identity. Are the processes similar, perhaps this could help people better understanding this topic?
Verbal overshadowing got to be a very interesting topic as we further discussed it in class. After reading this article, I did not have a clear understanding of the definition of verbal overshadowing. But, Sean did a nice job of explaining and working through all the little kinks. This study finds a correlation between verbal description of the potential perpetrator and a positive identification. It discusses the ideas that a recall of memory does not necessarily mean a recognition of the perpetrator. This person that the witness recognizes may be out of context, or they may have a less than original face. Which is why it is so crucial to have a lineup that is not flawed. Previous studies concluded that the correlation between ID and verbal description may be due to the relativity of the two topics. For example, some faces are much easier to identify than others, which would lead you to believe that such faces are also easier to describe than others. But, this article states that good identifiers are not good describers. But, it does make sense that faces which are easily described are also easily identified. Rather, it is stated that the relationship exists between descriptions of faces and identifications of faces. All in all, it was found that verbal descriptions can change an identification, and swing it the wrong way. This is crucial in our justice system, and needs to be taken seriously at the time of the questioning of the witness as well as the identification process.
-Cara