| Description |
Eyewitness testimonies are crucial in solving crimes. For decades, researchers have been interested in how to determine if those testimonies are accurate. The behaviors of eyewitnesses during an identification procedure, such as confidence and response time, may provide valuable information about an eyewitness's accuracy. Research on the impact of these reflector variables, considering eyewitnesses' individual differences, such as age, has not been thoroughly investigated. This thesis examined whether response time predicts lineup identification accuracy and whether there is a relationship between response time and the age of the participants. For this research, data from Moore et al. (under review) were analyzed. Participants ages 5 to 35 were recruited from local museums (OK and UT) and watched a 360-degree virtual reality theft scene with two perpetrators and then completed two lineups, a lineup per perpetrator: either target-present or target-absent (repeated measures design). In these lineups, they attempted to identify the perpetrators from the video, and their response time was measured by Qualtrics. Logistic regressions were used to analyze whether response time predicted accuracy (correctly identifying the perpetrator in the target-present condition and rejecting the lineup in the target-absent condition) and whether there were any significant differences in the relationship between response time and accuracy by age group. We found that response time did not predict eyewitness identification accuracy for target-present and absent conditions. At the same time, the age group alone predicted accuracy and older participants were more accurate than younger participants. The literature in the field is relatively new and offers mixed findings, so the results of this research help us better understand the relationships between reflector variables (e.g., response time) and accuracy in a dual lineup paradigm under realistic conditions. Future research should examine eyewitness identification accuracy in realistic conditions to determine general performance and whether response time can predict accuracy. |
