Effects of internal versus external distinctive facial features on eyewitness identification

Abstract

Many criminals have distinctive facial features such as tattoos, yet the potential impact on eyewitness memory has received little research attention. Does such a feature harm memory for the face at encoding, and can police do anything about this when constructing the lineup? Does it matter whether the feature is on the interior (e.g., tattoo on face) or exterior (e.g., tattoo on neck)? These are the kinds of questions that we investigated by randomly assigning a large nationwide sample of online participants to conditions within an experimental design in which we manipulated target exposure time, presence (and location) of a distinctive feature, and whether it is replicated or removed from lineup members. Results indicate that a distinctive feature harms memory for the face regardless of location, but replicating the feature in the lineup may attenuate this effect. Fortunately, high confidence was indicative of high accuracy regardless of our manipulations.