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Eyewitnesses carry out a range of tasks to help the police bring a criminal to justice. They describe what happened during the crime and the people involved. Later, there may be reasonable grounds for the police to believe they know who is responsible for the offence and this person then becomes a suspect. The police may put the suspect into a line-up or identification parade and ask eyewitnesses to see if they recognise the person they saw. If the suspect is picked out, this outcome is taken as evidence that the police have arrested the correct person. The police may then spend time building a case to convict the suspect, or dismiss him or her as either there is a lack of evidence to convict or another person is responsible for the crime. Eyewitnesses also provide testimony in a court of law. The police may use the description of an offender given by an eyewitness to try to locate this person using computer searches of previously convicted people. If a suspect cannot otherwise be identified, such as by using CCTV, DNA, fingerprints or other forensic evidence, eyewitnesses may construct a picture of the offender's face, an image called a facial composite. The police will usually circulate this image internally to police staff; if this does not identify the culprit, the image is often published on police websites, in newspapers, and on TV news and crime programmes in the hope that a member of the public will recognise the image and come forward with a name. Sometimes, the police try to establish identity by circulating a wanted poster; see Figure 12.1 for an example. The focus of this chapter is on the various types of evidence from eyewitnesses. There have been many cases of wrongful conviction, as illustrated later by the conviction of Laszlo Virag, and these woeful outcomes must be minimised. The chapter is guided by the wealth of psychological research that has attempted to understand and improve the performance of human memory. It will be seen that eyewitness ev

Meditative mindfulness practices, promoting sustained attention and reducing mind-wandering, have been associated with improvements in cognitive abilities and memory. The present study explored whether a non-meditative practice could be successfully applied in a forensic application; specifically, whether mindfulness instructions can be embedded in the face-composite construction process to facilitate identification. Twenty participants, who were not football fans, were asked to memorise an unfamiliar footballer’s face and return 24 hours later to construct a face using the self-administered EvoFIT facial composite system. In the experimental condition, mindfulness instructions were embedded in the EvoFIT system, encouraging witnesses to focus on the target face and the process; in the control condition, participants constructed the face using the standard EvoFIT system. Naming of the composites was attempted by 24 football fans, who each viewed 10 composites, five from each condition, and then the target footballer images to ensure they were familiar with the identities. Results showed significantly higher levels of correct naming for composites constructed using EvoFIT with mindfulness instructions compared to using the standard EvoFIT. These findings indicate the potential for non-meditative mindfulness instructions to assist face-composite construction, improving correct naming of ensuing composites.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in people with superior face recognition skills. Yet, identification of these individuals has mostly relied on criterion performance on a single attempt at a single measure of face memory. The current investigation aimed to examine the consistency of superior face recognition skills in 30 police officers, both across tests that tap into the same process, and between tests that tap into different components of face‐processing. Overall indices of performance across related measures were found to identify different superior performers to isolated test scores. Further, different top‐performers emerged for target‐present versus target‐absent indices, suggesting that signal detection measures are the most useful indicators of performance. Finally, a dissociation was observed between superior memory and matching performance. Super‐recognizer screening programmes should therefore include overall indices summarising multiple attempts at related tests, allowing for individuals to rank highly on different (and sometimes very specific) tasks.

Eyewitnesses are often asked to describe the appearance of an offender's face, normally as part of a cognitive interview (CI), and then to construct a facial composite of it by selecting hair, eyes, nose, and so on. Recent research indicates that facial composites of this type are rendered much more identifiable when constructors focus on global character (holistic) judgements of the face after having recalled it in detail. Here, we investigated whether components of this so-called holistic CI (H-CI) were applicable to newer ‘evolving’ (Darwinian) methods of face construction. We found that the face description component of the interview promoted better-quality composites than the holistic component, but the most identifiable composites emerged when both components were used together in the same interview as an H-CI. Composites were also more identifiable following description of all features of the face than an alternative involving description of hair. Implications are discussed for real-world face construction using evolving systems.

Face construction by selecting individual facial features rarely produces recognisable images. We have been developing a system called EvoFIT that works by the repeated selection and breeding of complete faces. Here, we explored two techniques. The first blurred the external parts of the face, to help users focus on the important central facial region. The second, manipulated an evolved face using psychologically-useful ‘holistic’ scales: age, masculinity, honesty, etc. Using face construction procedures that mirrored police work, a large benefit emerged for the holistic scales; the benefit of blurring accumulated over the construction process. Performance was best using both techniques: EvoFITs were correctly named 24.5% on average compared to 4.2% for faces constructed using a typical ‘feature’ system. It is now possible, therefore, to evolve a fairly recognisable composite from a 2 day memory of a face, the norm for real witnesses. A plausible model to account for the findings is introduced.