ABSTRACT We investigated whether using children's perceived similarity to construct lineups changed children's identification performance. After a pilot showing that children rate suspects and fillers as more similar than adults do, we ran three experiments with child eyewitnesses (ages 6–11, younger group 6–8; older, 9–11) and an adult comparison group (18‐ to 58‐years‐old; Experiment 3). We analyzed accuracy, discriminability, confidence‐accuracy calibration, and decision patterns (suspect identification, filler identification, or rejection), as a function of both target presence and lineup creator (adult‐ or child‐created). Experiments 1 and 2 found that child‐created lineups improved children's pattern of responding to suggest better discriminability and better confidence‐accuracy calibration. In Experiment 3, we extended the design to include an adult sample, finding no effect of lineup type for adult witnesses and limited benefits for children. These results suggest that age‐matched similarity information can improve children's lineup performance under some conditions, but the benefits are not universal.
Bruer et al. (Sat,) studied this question.