Details:
Please join us for our third installment of the 2014-2015 Brown Bag Speaker Series, featuring a presentation by Dr. John Wixted, titled “Eyewitness memory is much better than (and also as bad as) you think it is.”
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. No RSVP necessary. This event has been approved for 1 MCLE credit.
Date:
Tuesday, January 13th, 2015
Time:
12-:00 – 1:00pm
Location:
University of California, Irvine campus
Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway, room 1517
Abstract:
The fallibility of eyewitness memory is established knowledge among experimental psychologists and is increasingly well known among the general public as well. One important dimension of the story of eyewitness fallibility concerns the confidence that eyewitnesses express when making an identification (e.g., from a lineup). In the psychological laboratory, early research suggested that eyewitness confidence is, at best, only weakly related to accuracy. This finding dovetailed with the discovery that, in actual criminal cases, eyewitness misidentifications (often made with high confidence in a court of law) played a significant role in 75% of the more than 300 wrongful convictions that have been overturned by DNA evidence. However, more recent laboratory-based research unequivocally demonstrates that, contrary to what prior research suggested, eyewitness confidence is a very reliable predictor of accuracy. Is the same true of eyewitnesses in the real world? To answer that question, a clear distinction needs to be drawn between the initial identification (e.g., made from a lineup) and the much later identification that occurs in a court of law. New field research shows that confidence in an initial identification is indeed a very reliable predictor of accuracy (in agreement with laboratory-based research). However, because memory is malleable, the confidence expressed much later in a court of law is far less reliable. These considerations suggest that it is time to stop blaming eyewitness misidentifications for wrongful convictions because the key mistake is being made by the legal system, which chooses to ignore the reliable expression of confidence provided by eyewitnesses at the time of the initial ID in favor of the much less reliable ID they make in a court of law.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Wixted is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his doctoral degree at Emory University in 1987. Dr. Wixted’s research is primarily concerned with evaluating mathematical models of memory. With regard to human memory, his research focuses mainly on the analysis of recall latency distributions in both normal and memory-impaired individuals (such as patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease). With regard to animal memory, his research focuses on signal detection analyses of memory for the absence of an event and memory for event duration. He has won several awards for excellence in teaching and was an elected fellow for the Association for Psychological Science in 2011. He has both published in and served on the editorial board of many top-tiered scholarly journals, such as Psychological Review and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analyses.
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