The debate regarding the best way to test and measure eyewitness memory has dominated the eyewitness literature for more than thirty years. We argue that to resolve this debate requires the development and application of appropriate measurement models. In this study we develop models of simultaneous and sequential lineup presentations and use these to compare the procedures in terms of discriminability and response bias. We tested a key prediction of the diagnostic feature detection hypothesis that discriminability should be greater for simultaneous than sequential lineups. We fit the models to the corpus of studies originally described by Palmer and Brewer (2012, Law and Human Behavior, 36(3), 247-255) and to data from a new experiment. The results of both investigations showed that discriminability did not differ between the two procedures, while responses were more conservative for sequential presentation compared to simultaneous presentation. We conclude that the two procedures do not differ in the efficiency with which they allow eyewitness memory to be expressed. We discuss the implications of this for the diagnostic feature detection hypothesis and other sequential lineup procedures used in current jurisdictions.
Do sequential lineups impair underlying discriminability?
