Brewer, N. &  Day, K. (2005) The confidence-accuracy and decision latency-accuracy relationships in children’s eyewitness identification. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 12(1), 119-127.

 

Eyewitness identification can be one of the most important and relied upon pieces of evidence in a criminal case.  Because of this, much recent research has focused on trying to prove how reliable eyewitnesses are and also what the reliable ways of extracting information from these eyewitnesses is.  Of particular interest to researchers in this article is the confidence of eyewitnesses as well as identification decision latency and how these factors correlate with a witness’s ability to correctly identify a perpetrator.  The group of interest is children.  The researchers wish to compare adolescents to younger children.

 

Procedure:

The participants were 240 8-10 year olds and 159 14-17 year olds.  The tests were administered in a school’s computer lab where participants were shown a video tape of a simulated crime.  After this, participants then completed a distracter task and were asked to identify the perpetrator from a list of suspects in which the perpetrator was present.  The children were given the chance to pick any suspect or to reply that he was not present.  After identification, the participants were asked to rate their confidence on a scale that had been especially designed to elicit the least amount of confusion.  As an added precaution, the experimenters explained the confidence scale to the children in a pre-tested way that had produced good results with a different set of children.

 

Results:

 

Correct Identifications:

There was no difference between groups in the proportion of participants who made a positive identification response (i.e. choosers) however, between those who made a positive identification; children were much less accurate than adolescents.

 

Confidence:

Children were slightly more confident than adolescents. Also, correct identifications were made with more confidence than incorrect choices of rejections.

 

Confidence-accuracy relation:

Children were much more likely to say they were certain when they were wrong.  When children said they were “really sure,” they were correct less than 50% of the time.  This can be contrasted with adolescents who were correct 93% of the time when they indicated they were “really sure”. 

 

Decision Latency:

Children were slightly faster than adolescents. However, it was not a significant difference.

 

Decision Latency Accuracy relation:

For adolescents, decision latency was a weak predictor of accuracy, but this was not significant. 

 

Discussion:

Researchers found that though children were, on average, a little more confident than adolescents, the certainty-accuracy relationship was significant.  Children were definitely found to be more over confident in relation to adolescents.  Importantly, this significance was found without including a target-absent line-up condition and the researchers speculate that had this been included, the difference between groups would have been even more striking.

The decision latency-accuracy relationships were found to be relatively weak and negative and mostly just show that children are more impulsive than adolescents.

Important Legal Disclaimer: The preceding are articles we read together in the Lampinen Lab Spring 2006 false memory reading group. By clicking on the button next to the article you can see the summary of that article. The summary was prepared by the student presenting that article and it is of course the case that the views expressed in the summary do not necessarily represent the views of the reading group as a whole, Dr. Lampinen, the Lampinen Lab, Hugo's, the University of Arkansas, the Razorback Football or Basketball teams (although we're not sure about cross country), people living down the street from us, Bob Dylan, Jack Fate, our extended families, or anyone else for that matter except for the student who wrote the summary (and they don't necessarily believe what they wrote either).