Post‐dicting eyewitness accuracy: Confidence, decision‐times and person descriptions of choosers and non‐choosers

This study sought to investigate the utility of several variables to post‐dict eyewitness identifcation accuracy in target‐present and target‐absent line‐ups in a staged‐event paradigm. The incident involved an altercation between an experimenter and a confederate who a empted to take away the slide projector needed for an ongoing laboratory experiment. Sixty‐two subject‐witnesses were called back to the laboratory one week after the incident, purportedly to answer some additional questions about the laboratory experiment. They were asked to provide a description of the intruder and to indicate whether or not they thought they would be able to identify the target (pre‐decision confidence). Next, they saw a video line‐up with or without the target present. Using choice of a line‐up member as a mediating variable, with choosers post‐decision confidence (r = 0.58) and decision‐time (r = −0.43) were strongly related to the accuracy of this choice while pre‐decision confidence was not. For non‐choosers, no meaningful relationship between these variables and identifcation accuracy was observed. There was also some evidence that the number of descriptors was significantly related to identifcation accuracy (r = 0.28). Results are discussed in terms of the importance of choice as a mediating variable for post‐dieting identification decisions in studies using both target‐present and target‐absent line‐ups. Forensic implications of confidence and decision‐time as verbal and non‐verbal indicators for the post‐hoc assessment of identifcation accuracy are stressed.