Eye Witness Testimony

Investigations by James Blascovich, Andrew Beall, Rosanna Guadagno, Alex Dimov and Jeremy Bailenson examine the possibility that virtual environments will aid in our understanding of how witnesses of crimes identify suspects. Current police lineup procedures rely predominantly on mug photographs when conducting lineups. We believe that conducting lineups using three-dimensional, digital busts of heads and bodies offers a number of advantages: witnesses can view the suspects and distracters from any angle (not just front and profile), witnesses can move as close or as far from the suspects as they desire, test administrators can use mathematical models to distance the distracters from the actual suspects by simply morphing the underlying mesh model of the suspect, the lineup can occur within the virtual crime scene (i.e. the suspects and foils can lineup in the context of the actual crime, and finally, the virtual suspects and distracters can be animated, not just static. Our current study is examining whether eye-witness recall is as effective in a virtual line-up as in a real line-up.