Witnesses were more accurate when they interacted with 3-D models than when they looked at still...
A new study suggests that interacting with digital, three-dimensional models-a set of virtual heads that can be manipulated with a computer mouse-could make eyewitness evidence more accurate.
"We've developed a new interactive lineup procedure that allows witnesses to rotate the faces into any position desired," says Heather Flowe, a professor of forensic psychology at the University of Birmingham in England and a co-author of the paper, which was published in Scientific Reports.
Flowe's team thought digital technology could help.
It transforms a video clip or several images of a face into a 3-D digital model, which is placed in an interactive lineup, where it can be manipulated with a mouse or with a finger.
To test their digital lineup, the researchers recruited about 1,400 participating subjects through online crowdsourcing.
Finally, they received either a set of photographs or a set of digital models and were asked to identify the "Perpetrator." Those who used the interactive lineup did much better at choosing the correct face.
What made the moveable 3-D digital models so effective? "We think it's through matching the pose in which people encoded or studied the perpetrator at the time of the crime-that then they remember that information, and they seek it out in the lineup so as to cue their memory for the face," Flowe says.
In another set of tests that were also described in the new study, subjects saw a lineup of still photographs with the heads either in the same position the perpetrator predominantly had in the video or in a different position.
Flowe and Colloff work in the U.K., where departments routinely record video "Mug shots" of potential suspects turning their head from side to side-an ideal basis for a digital model.
As Flowe points out, the cost of such improvements to lineup technology would be much less than the cost of mistaken eyewitnesses.