The benefits of recognition over recall
The image above was generated by AI. I have to say, it would be a pretty unfair line up if the guilty party was the woman bottom left or the man top right.
A recent article in The Psychologist magazine prompted me to focus this mailing on suspect identification, a topic of relevance to my recent novel The Expert Witness. Those of us who aren’t involved with law enforcement would probably draw on films and TV programmes to conjure an image of a police line up or book of mugshots. But psychologists researching the process have developed a new approach which is showing remarkable success. This process relies on recognition rather than recall. So what’s the difference?
Recall is a harder process as the brain needs to search for the information. For example, remembering the name of a minor character in a book you read several months ago; or dragging up facts you learnt years ago in school for a quiz question.
Recognition requires less work as external prompts are available to remind us. For example, hearing lyrics of a song can cue us to remember the title or tune; a multiple choice question can remind us of the correct factual answer.
In terms of suspect recognition, psychologists found that by removing the extremities of a face from the image – the ears, neck and hair – eyewitnesses were able to focus on the features and face shape. The eye area was particularly useful for recall. They manipulated images of the face from thinner through to fuller; made the mouth/eyes relatively expressionless or slightly smiling; adapted ‘femininity/masculinity’, age and overall healthiness.
This enabled witnesses to pick out a likeness of the person they believe they saw. When the chosen images were released to the public, police found improved results: more people recognised the person and were able to provide a name for the suspect who could then be brought in for questioning.
If you’re interested, more information can be found here: https://evofit.co.uk/how-it-works/
and here https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/co-evolving-new-way-catch-criminals