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Material Difficulty And Individual Difference Factors Moderate The Eyewitness Confidence-Accuracy Relationship, Wenbo Lin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent studies have shown that eyewitness confidence is positively associated with high identification (ID) accuracy, but some eyewitness researchers have expressed concerns regarding the reliability of this confidence-accuracy relationship in applied settings (e.g., are there circumstances or moderator variables that make this relationship less reliable?). For the present study, we considered two types of moderator variables: material difficulty (i.e., the difficulty level associated with different sets of eyewitness stimuli) and individual difference factors such as face recognition ability. Experiment 1 examined whether these moderator variables significantly impair the confidence-accuracy relationship and Experiment 2 examined whether these same moderator variables equally …