Feeling the future of eyewitness research

Abstract

For decades, eyewitness memory research has had the worthy goal of minimizing the chances that an innocent suspect is falsely identified. However, this is not the only goal. Partial receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves provide a way to identify lineup procedures that keep the false alarm rate low while also maximizing the hit rate. Recently, there have been attempts to extend the ROC curve into high false alarm rate regions that fair lineups are intentionally designed to avoid. These new full ROCs could provide a way for the police to circumvent the protections offered by fillers in a fair lineup. Moreover, these attempts to extend the ROC curve are not based on a mathematically coherent model of latent diagnostic signals. In this article, we empirically demonstrate how this lack of a solid foundation can lead to dubious conclusions, such as eyewitnesses possessing precognition and being able to reliably identify the person they will see commit a crime in the future.