Does Practice Make Perfect in Children's Eyewitness Identifcation Accuracy

Abstract

Children accurately identify targets out of police lineups at much lower rates than adults. Furthermore, children presented with a target-absent lineup are much less accurate even when compared to their peers who view target-present lineups. Administering practice lineups to children prior to the real, or forensically relevant, lineup has been proposed in the past as a method to improve accuracy, but current literature has produced unsatisfactory results; improvement in target-absent accuracy is often accompanied by a performance cost for those selecting from a target-present lineup. Additionally, previous efforts have constructed practice lineups too obviously different from forensically relevant lineups, and have overlooked theoretical contributions stemming from developmental and cognitive research. The current study addressed these methodological issues. Results garnered suggest that practice lineups do not improve children’s identification accuracy, and that under certain circumstances they actually decrease accuracy. This may be due to practice lineups decreasing children’s decision criterion, or to a limitation children have with regards to this difficult task. Implications and future directions with regards to research are discussed.

keywords: eyewitness identification, memory, children, practice