Study title

Eyewitnesses are widely believed to have a better chance of identifying a perpetrator from a live identification procedure than from photo or video alternatives. To test this live superiority hypothesis, prospective students and their parents (N = 1048) became unsuspecting witnesses to staged events and were randomly assigned to live, photo, or video identification procedures. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a single person at the identification procedure. In Experiment 2, participants viewed a lineup of six people. Across experiments, live identification procedures did not improve eyewitness identification performance. The results show that even under experimental settings designed to eliminate the disadvantages of conducting live lineups in practice, live presentation confers no benefit to eyewitnesses.After observing a crime, eyewitnesses can provide law enforcement personnel with important information about the criminal's identity. This is often achieved by pointing out the criminal from an identity parade. The basic procedure for an identity parade is to have the witness inspect a group of people and judge whether one of them is the criminal, but the procedures used to administer identity parades vary substantially across jurisdictions. In countries like Australia and South Africa, parade members appear in person - similar to how identification procedures tend to be depicted in popular films. Live parades are also used in the USA and Canada, but identification from photographs (or "mugshots") is far more common. In the UK, recent legislation has led to the widespread use of video technology to present identity parades. Such disparity in procedures begs the question: Which one is best? When considering the pragmatics of the different techniques, photo and video identifications are the clear favourites. Finding suitable people to appear in a live parade is not always easy, whereas the availability of large databases of photo and video images...