Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Improving Witnesses' Predictive Confidence Judgments By Enhancing Test Domain Familiarity, Laura J. Shambaugh

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent research on witnesses’ pre-identification confidence (“predictive confidence”) suggests that these judgments are moderately related to identification accuracy when witnesses experience encoding variability and appropriate statistical techniques are used. However, other research shows that under ecologically valid conditions involving a single identification, the relationship between predictive confidence and accuracy deteriorates. One potential explanation for this lack of a meaningful confidence-accuracy relationship is that witnesses are unfamiliar with the lineup task leading them to underestimate its difficulty. Identification difficulty is partly determined by the similarity of lineup fillers to the suspect, which witnesses cannot anticipate when they make a predictive confidence …