The Elderly Eyewitness in Court 2013016485, 9781848726130, 9781848725386, 9781315813936

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The Elderly Eyewitness in Court

The majority of research on eyewitness memory has traditionally studied children and young adults. By contrast, this volume is designed to provide an overview of empirical research on the cognitive, social, and health related factors that impact the accuracy of eyewitness testimony given by the elderly. The book takes a life span developmental perspective that incorporates research on witnesses of all ages but uses the findings to focus on issues unique to the elderly. This includes research on recognition memory with lineup identifications and recall memory that occurs when an elderly witness is asked to describe an event in court. The Elderly Eyewitness in Court also examines jurors’ reactions to the testimony of an elderly witness and the legal and social policy issues that emerge when the elderly witness participates in legal proceedings. While reviewing what is known about the elderly witness, the book also provides a direction for future research into this new frontier of scientific inquiry. Its audience spans researchers in cognitive and developmental psychology and professionals working in the growing area of psychology and law. Michael P. Toglia, PhD, is a professor and chair of psychology at the University of North Florida. From 2003 to 2011, he was executive director of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. He has published extensively on eyewitness memory issues, has peer-reviewed nearly 500 articles and chapters, and has frequently testified in court. A former Fulbright grant recipient, he is a fellow in the Association for Psychological Science, the Midwestern Psychological Association, and two divisions of the American Psychological Association. David F. Ross, PhD, is UC Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Dr. Ross is interested in factors that influence the accuracy of lineup identification accuracy and how jurors perceive eyewitness testimony. Dr. Ross has received funding for his research from the National Institute of Science and the Department of Justice. He has also published five edited volumes on the psychology of eyewitness testimony, has written numerous articles in top-tier journals in psychology including several law reviews, provides training to law enforcement on how to collect identification evidence,

and is an instructor at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Dr. Ross has also served as a trial consultant for nearly 25 years, assisting attorneys with jury selection, mock trials, witness preparation, and trial strategy. Joanna Pozzulo, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University, Ontario, Canada. Borrowing from developmental, social, and cognitive psychology, her research focuses on the identification abilities of child eyewitnesses. Dr. Pozzulo is interested in understanding the identification processes eyewitnesses engage and the best identification procedures to be used by police in order to obtain the most accurate identification evidence. Both Dr. Pozzulo’s research and teaching have received numerous awards. She has coauthored textbooks in forensic psychology for both the Canadian and American student. In addition, Dr. Pozzulo has written more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Emily Pica, MS, is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University with a concentration in forensic psychology. In 2012, Ms. Pica was one of only four PhD candidates at Carleton University to be awarded the highly prestigious Trillium Scholarship. She also received a highly prestigious award for teaching from the Council of Canadian Departments of Psychology. Ms. Pica graduated with her MS from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she conducted research on factors that impact eyewitness memory in adults with a special emphasis on the cross-race effect in lineup identification.

The Elderly Eyewitness in Court Edited by Michael P. Toglia, David F. Ross, Joanna Pozzulo, and Emily Pica

First published 2014 by Psychology Press 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Psychology Press 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA Psychology Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Elderly Eyewitness in Court / edited by Michael P. Toglia, David F. Ross, Joanna Pozzulo, and Emily Pica. pages cm BJ1533.R42H825 2013 179—dc23 2013016485 ISBN: 978-1-84872-613-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-84872-538-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-81393-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Contributors Preface

ix xi

D AV I D F. R O S S , JOANNA P OZ Z UL O, AND E MI LY PICA

PART I

Memory for People 1 The Reliability of Eyewitness Identifications by the Elderly: An Evidence-Based Review

1

3

S I E G F R I E D L . S P ORE R AND NATAL I E MART S CH U K

2 Misinformation Effect in Older Versus Younger Adults: A Meta-Analysis and Review

38

L I N D S E Y E . WYL I E , L AWRE NCE PAT I HI S , L E S LIE L. McC U LLER , D E B O R A H D AVI S , E VE M. BRANK, E L I Z ABE T H F. LO FTU S, A N D B R I A N H . BORNS T E I N

3 True and False Recognition of Faces by Young and Old Adults

67

J A M E S C . B A RT L E T T

4 Eyewitness Identifications: The Interaction Between Witness Age and Estimator Variables

93

J E N N I F E R L . BE AUDRY AND CHRI S T I NA L . BULLA RD

5 Improving the Performance of Older Witnesses on Identification Procedures R A C H E L WI L COCK AND RAY BUL L

118

vi

Contents

PART II

Memory for Events 6 Aging and False Memory: Fuzzy-Trace Theory and the Elderly Eyewitness

135

137

C A R L O S F. A . GOME S , BRI T TANY R. COHE N, ALISH A D ESA I, C H A R L E S J . BRAI NE RD, AND VAL E RI E F. RE YNA

7 Eyewitness Memory and Metamemory in Older Adults

167

J O D I P R I C E , MI CHAE L L . MUE L L E R, S TACY WETMO R E, A N D J E F F R E Y NE US CHAT Z

8 Associative Memory Deficits: Implications for the Elderly Eyewitness

192

D O N N A J . L A VOI E AND KE T HE RA F OGL E R

9 Accuracy of Eyewitness Memory for Events in Young and Older Adults

210

A L A I T Z A I Z P URUA, MAL E N MI GUE L E S , AND E LV I R A G A R CÍ A- BAJOS

10 Memory Trust and Distrust in Elderly Eyewitnesses: To What Extent Do Older Adults Doubt Their Memories?

232

L I N D A A . H E NKE L

11 Interviewing the Elderly Eyewitness

263

TA M M Y A . M ARCHE , JE NNI F E R L . BRI E RE , T E RR I L. C O R D WELL, A N D R O B Y N E . HOL L I DAY

PART III

Special Topics in Elderly Eyewitness Memory

287

12 A Credible Crime Report? Communication and Perceived Credibility of Elderly Eyewitnesses

289

M E R E D I T H A LL I S ON AND C. A. E L I Z ABE T H BRIMA CO MB E

13 Uniting Theory to Empirical Evidence: How to Understand Memory of the Elderly Witness AYA N N A K . T HOMAS , L E AMARI E T. GORDON, A N D J O H N B . B U L EVI CH

308

Contents 14 The Older Witness in Court: An International Perspective

vii 336

G R A H A M D AVI E S AND NOE L L E ROBE RT S ON

15 Testimony by the Elderly in the Eyes of the Jury: The Impact of Juror Characteristics

363

A N N A E . P I T TMAN, MI CHAE L P. TOGL I A, CHRI STO PH ER T. LEO N E, A N D K AT R I N U. MUE L L E R- JOHNS ON

Index

383

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Contributors

Alaitz Aizpurua, University of the Basque Country Meredith Allison, Elon University James C. Bartlett, University of Texas–Dallas Jennifer L. Beaudry, Swinburne University of Technology Brian H. Bornstein, University of Nebraska Charles J. Brainerd, Cornell University Eve M. Brank, University of Nebraska Jennifer L. Briere, University of Saskatchewan C. A. Elizabeth Brimacombe, University of Victoria John B. Bulevich, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Ray Bull, University of Leicester Christina L. Bullard, Swinburne University of Technology Brittany R. Cohen, Cornell University Terri L. Cordwell, University of Saskatchewan Graham Davies, University of Leicester Deborah Davis, University of Nevada–Reno Alisha Desai, Cornell University Kethera Fogler, James Madison University Elvira García-Bajos, University of the Basque Country Carlos F. A. Gomes, Cornell University Leamarie T. Gordon, Tufts University Linda A. Henkel, Fairfield University

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Contributors

Robyn E. Holliday, University of Leicester Donna J. LaVoie, St. Louis University Christopher T. Leone, University of North Florida Elizabeth F. Loftus, University of California–Irvine Tammy A. Marche, University of Saskatchewan Natalie Martschuk, Charles Stuart University Leslie L. McCuller, University of Nebraska Malen Migueles, University of the Basque Country Michael L. Mueller, Kent State University Katrin U. Mueller-Johnson, University of Cambridge Jeffrey Neuschatz, University of Alabama–Huntsville Lawrence Patihis, University of California–Irvine Anna E. Pittman, University of North Florida Jodi Price, University of Alabama–Huntsville Valerie F. Reyna, Cornell University Noelle Robertson, University of Leicester Siegfried L. Sporer, University of Giessen Ayanna K. Thomas, Tufts University Stacy Wetmore, University of Oklahoma Rachel Wilcock, London South Bank University Lindsey E. Wylie, University of Nebraska

Preface David F. Ross, Joanna Pozzulo, and Emily Pica

The Elderly Eyewitness in Court evolved, in part, from two volumes we published on child witnesses in the late 1980s and two volumes we recently published on eyewitness testimony of younger adults. In the early 1980s many states were abolishing legal obstacles that prohibited children from testifying. As the legal milieu changed it generated an explosion of research on children’s eyewitness memory. This surge also was fueled by numerous criminal cases of alleged child sexual abuse and a public desire to see these cases go to trial. As a result we published two edited volumes designed to capture the findings, themes, and developments in the field, namely, Children’s Eyewitness Memory (Ceci, Toglia, & Ross, 1987) and Perspectives on Children’s Testimony (Ceci, Ross, & Toglia, 1989). The motivation for the present volume emerged from a change in the social and legal milieu similar to that observed 25 years ago with the child witness and because there is a growing literature on the eyewitness ability of the elderly witness that was in need of being compiled into a volume that could be used by researchers and legal professionals who work directly with the elderly in the legal system. As the percentage of elderly citizens continues to grow as a demographic category, along with a social concern about crimes against the elderly, there is a need to understand how to treat the elderly witness in court. As seen in many of the chapters in this volume, there is a concern that like the child witness, the elderly represent a special category of vulnerable witnesses who may be in need of protection as they participate as witnesses in the legal system. As a result, in this volume we present the extant research on the cognitive, social, and physical factors that impact the accuracy of eyewitness testimony given by the elderly. We solicited contributions from leading researchers on issues related to the elderly eyewitness, taking a developmental perspective that incorporated research on witnesses of all ages but focused primarily on the elderly. This volume is divided into three parts, with research focusing on (a) memory for people, (b) memory for events, and (c) special topics concerning the elderly eyewitness.

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Part I: Memory for People The first section of the volume focuses on memory for people, emphasizing research on the factors that increase and decrease the accuracy of lineup identification (recognition memory) as it progresses through the police investigation process that occurs from when the witness observes the crime to when he or she testifies in court. We capitalize on an important distinction drawn by Wells (1978) when he proposed differentiating between estimator and system variables associated with eyewitness lineups. Wells defined system variables as factors in lineup procedures that are under direct control of the legal system. In this volume, five chapters relay research on how the procedures used to construct and implement lineups impact elderly lineup identification accuracy. For example, how do elderly people respond to lineup instructions that a suspect may or may not be in a lineup or variations in lineup type as in simultaneous (where all the lineup photos are shown at the same time) versus sequential (where each lineup photo is shown one at a time). Similarly, are show-ups (a single person “lineup,” usually administered live) just as suggestive for older witnesses as they are for younger witnesses? A second category of factors, estimator variables, was defined by Wells as ones that influence eyewitness accuracy but over which the justice system has no control, such as cross-race versus within-race identifications, level of stress, and viewing opportunity. Thus, in Part I, 14 authors from North America, Europe, and Australia examine system and estimator variables related to the elderly eyewitness. Facial recognition made by elderly adults is discussed in Chapter 3, written by James Bartlett. The reliability of eyewitness identifications made by the elderly is also covered in Chapter 1, written by Siegfried L. Sporer and Natalie Martschuk. In Chapter 5, Rachel Wilcock and Ray Bull discuss how to improve performance of elderly witnesses on identification procedures. A comparison of the misinformation effect in younger and older adults is included in Chapter 2 by Lindsey E. Wylie and colleagues. Estimator variables and how they may interact with witness age on eyewitness identifications also are examined in Chapter 4, by Jennifer Beaudry and Christina Bullard.

Part II: Memory for Events The second section of the volume focuses on elderly memory in general and the factors that impact the elderly in terms of their ability to provide recall testimony for observed events. This occurs when an elderly witness is asked to provide a narrative recollection of a memory for an event. For example, Chapter 7 by Jodi Price and colleagues discusses metamemory in the elderly. In Chapter 8, Donna LaVoie and Kethera Fogler discuss memory deficit in the elderly. C. F. A. Gomes and colleagues discuss the fuzzy-trace theory and how it applies to the elderly witness in Chapter 6. A comparison of the accuracy of memory for events between younger and older adults is included in Chapter 9, by Alaitz Aizpurua and colleagues.

Preface xiii A second area that is covered in this section is the impact of misleading or suggestive questioning on the elderly witnesses’ reporting of their memory. While an enormous literature exists in regard to suggestibility in children and younger adults, relatively little is known about the suggestibility of the elderly witness. Using misleading information to implant false memories that never occurred is another topic examined in this section of the book. This is another form of suggestibility, but rather than modifying an existing memory, the issue is establishing a false memory for an event that never took place. In addition to implanted false memories, researchers also have studied spontaneous false memories, particularly in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm (see Brainerd & Reyna, 2005 for a review). This and other forms of autosuggestion have been extensively examined with young adults and with some frequency in children. Linda Henkel addresses an extension of autosuggestibility to older populations in Chapter 10. Last in this section, techniques designed to improve the accuracy of elderly recall memory are examined. In particular, an examination of the impact of the cognitive interview, a protocol that involves providing the witness instructions for how to search his or her memory prior to being asked to recall the event. The cognitive interview has been found to be effective with younger adults, but little is known about its impact on the elderly witness. Central to being able to accurately recall an event is the concept of source monitoring, or the ability to track the basis of a single memory or differentiate between multiple memories, and this is critical to providing eyewitness testimony. Chapter 11, by Tammy Marche and her colleagues, is on interviewing the elderly witness and examines the theoretical and applied aspects of source monitoring in these witnesses. In sum, this section of the volume incorporates a diverse set of chapters that all focus on recall memory.

Part III: Special Topics in Elderly Eyewitness Memory The final section of the volume focuses on what we refer to as “special topics.” They fit together more loosely than the chapters in the first two sections, but they are critical, we argue, to a complete understanding of eyewitness abilities (both recall and recognition memory) in the elderly witness. For example, what is the impact of physical and psychological health on elderly eyewitness memory? How do health-related impairments affect elderly witness memory? Also, what are the cognitive and social factors that emerge when the elderly testify in cases of elder abuse? As an aside, elder abuse is a key motivating factor underlying some of the recent research on older victim/witnesses. In this regard, we may be experiencing a similar fueling of experimental work in the elderly that resembles the stimulation of experimental attention to child witnesses 25 years ago. Ayanna Thomas and her colleagues in Chapter 13 discuss how to understand the memory of the elderly witness. Chapter 12 by Meredith Allison and C. A. Elizabeth Brimacombe considers how jurors react to the testimony of elderly witnesses. There has been a considerable amount

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of research on what defines witness credibility and how jurors perceive child and adult witnesses, but in this section the focus is on how jurors perceive the elderly witness. An international perspective concerning the elderly witness in court is also included in Chapter 14, by Graham Davies and Noelle Robertson. Last, Chapter 15 examines “need for cognition” and perceptions of an elderly witness by Anna E. Pittman and her colleagues.

References Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2005). The science of false memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Ceci, S. J., Ross, D. F., & Toglia, M. P. (Eds.). (1989). Perspectives on children’s testimony. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. Ceci, S. J., Toglia, M. P., Ross, D. F. (Eds.). (1987) Children’s eyewitness memory. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. Wells, G. (1978). Applied eyewitness-testimony research: System variables and estimator variables. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 440–448. doi:10. 1037/0022–3514.36.12.1546

Part I

Memory for People

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1

The Reliability of Eyewitness Identifications by the Elderly An Evidence-Based Review Siegfried L. Sporer and Natalie Martschuk

Introduction Elderly people will present a larger portion of the population in the coming decades because of increased life expectancy in the general population. A possible implication is that the elderly may be more likely to become victims or witnesses of certain types of crimes than in earlier decades (e.g., Dunlop, Rothman, & Hirt, 2001), unless fear of crime makes them avoid public contact. Consider the following example: In November 1980, a 66-year-old woman woke up in her bed while a man was assaulting her. His face was covered with a stocking mask; he wore a cap, gloves, and a coat. She was hesitant to describe or identify her assaulter. Tips from informants led the police to a man called Willie Davidson. When the victim was shown a photo array with Davidson in it, she recognized him as a person who had visited her 1 day before the attack. The next day, she reported to her daughter that she was sure that he was the assaulter. The police then put a stocking on Davidson’s head and asked the victim to identify him, which she did. As a result of eyewitness misidentification, improper forensic science, and ignorance of his alibi, Davidson was convicted and sentenced to 20 years and was released from prison after 12 years. After a DNA test was negative, Davidson was granted a full pardon. He had served 12 years for a crime he did not commit. (For a full case description, see The Innocence Project, n.d.-b) Besides government misconduct, this case demonstrates many factors likely to affect eyewitness identification as a function of old age: fallibility in memory, poor recognition memory, source monitoring deficits, suggestibility, acquiescence, and perhaps a personal motive to punish someone. This chapter describes these and other factors associated with old age and identification accuracy. Definition of Old Age In the gerontology literature it is customary to treat “old age” not as a single category but to refer to different groups of elderly, sometimes labeled youngold, middle-old, and old-old. Unfortunately, most studies in the psychological

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Siegfried L. Sporer and Natalie Martschuk

literature reviewed in our two meta-analyses did not converge on any such definitions, although some individual studies did differentiate subgroups of elderly as young-old or old-old. In our meta-analyses, studies were included when direct comparisons between a group of young participants (usually in their early 20s or between 20 and 30 years old) and a group of elderly participants with a minimum mean age group of 60 years or older were included. We provide additional details for our meta-analyses subsequently and mention the respective age definitions when discussing individual studies. Toward the end of this chapter, we graphically presenting results as a function of mean ages of the elderly groups to demonstrate the continual nature of the old age effect discussed here. In the psychology of memory literature, natural aging is associated with changes in memory performance. This starts with reduced encoding of incoming information due to decreasing functioning of sensory organs with aging. One reason is the physiological changes of the eyes—for example, the increased rigidity of the iris and the lens, reduced pupil diameter, or the increased likelihood of cataracts (Kline & Scialfa, 1996). In addition, the elderly seem to record fewer visual stimuli than young people in the same time (MuellerJohnson & Ceci, 2007; Yarmey, 1996). Further, from a neuropsychological perspective, structural changes of the brain cause changes in memory function (Moulin, Thompson, Wright, & Conway, 2007). A decrease of brain volume was shown at around 0.22% per annum from the age of 20 up to 80 years by Fotenos, Mintun, Snyder, Morris, and Buckner (2008) in a cross-sectional and longitudinal study with 18- to 97-year-old participants. In particular, changes of the frontal lobe are important for eyewitness research (Moulin et al., 2007). Frontal lobe damage causes deficits in free recall of events and in the ability to correctly monitor sources as well as in meta-memory, which depicts reflections about one’s own memory (Mayes, 2000). However, this may not impact recognition because recall and recognition represent two different systems (Tulving, 2000). While recall requires free reproduction of memory contents, for example, of an event or person, recognition involves the correct discrimination of items between new and old items, that is, the culprit in a lineup. Furthermore, for person identification, recognition is not sufficient but must be linked with the circumstances of encounter (the scene of the crime), which in essence is a source-monitoring problem. Furthermore, natural aging causes changes in information processing, working memory capacity, inhibition of irrelevant information, and deterioration of long-term memory (Park & Reuter-Lorenz, 2009), specifically episodic memory (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin, Guez, Kilb, & Reedy, 2004). Aging processes are associated with a continuous decrease of processing speed, working memory, and short- and long-term memory but also with a lifelong increase of knowledge-based verbal ability (e.g., in vocabulary), as demonstrated by Park et al. (2002) in a study of 345 people ranging between 20 and 92 years. Support for an increase in verbal fluency also comes from a recent study with

An Evidence-Based Review 5 participants aged between 17 and 78 years in which verbal fluency, in particular letter fluency, improved when changes in processing speed were controlled for (Elgamal, Roy, & Sharratt, 2011). However, such findings may be moderated by educational opportunities that some elderly cohorts (e.g., in the post–World War II period) may not have had. Considering that person descriptions and identification show only small correlations (see the meta-analysis by Meissner, Sporer, & Susa, 2008), verbal abilities are unlikely to be associated with person identifications but may become relevant when evaluating elderly witnesses present their testimony before court (see Figure 1.1 and the last section of this chapter). Another important aspect of aging is the reduced capacity to inhibit irrelevant information (Hasher & Zacks, 1988). Thus, older adults show deficits and slowing in working memory as well as slowing due to inaccurate selection of relevant and irrelevant information and inefficient removal of no longer needed content (Park & Reuter-Lorenz, 2009). To what extent this deficit also affects a witness in an identification task is an intriguing question, particularly with a larger number of foils (as is common in Great Britain). Age-related memory differences are postulated to go along with a decrease of controlled memory processes, whereas automatic memory processes remain intact (Jennings & Jacoby, 1993). In contrast to an unimpaired memory, this results in aggravated information processing. This affects both the memory of relevant situational characteristics as well as of variations of familiar stimuli. Consequently, older people are more likely to be susceptible to changes in the context of the stimuli presented (faces). Furthermore, older people’s ability to distinguish between internal and external memory contents is more limited, and thus the ability to correctly identify the origin of a memory. Research has shown that people have difficulty matching the source of a memory correctly, especially with thematically similar information (Lindsay, Allen, Chan, & Dahl, 2004). This seems to affect above all older adults (over 65 years), who were shown to be more suggestible to misleading information than their younger counterparts (e.g., Cohen & Faulkner, 1989; Loftus, Levidow, & Duensing, 1992; see also Bornstein, 1995). Eyewitness Recall and Recognition When people become witnesses to a crime, they have to decide whether to report it to the police, and if yes, when. Whether the elderly report crimes more frequently than younger people is an interesting question of its own but is beyond the scope of this chapter. If witnesses do decide to report a crime they will be questioned by the police about the event as well as about the perpetrator or perpetrators involved. Witnesses usually start with a free narrative—referred to as free recall by memory researchers—followed by more specific questions referred to as cued recall. They may also be asked to create an image of the perpetrator with a police sketch artist or with computerized face composite systems like FACES or Evofit (see Davies & Valentine, 2007). Besides descriptions of

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the perpetrator, witnesses also may be asked to identify a suspect from a photo spread (or a live lineup). From a memory perspective, this is a recognition task that has received considerable attention in the eyewitness literature. The focus of this chapter is a review of person identification and face recognition studies that have investigated differences between elderly and young people. These differences may be affected by factors operating at the perceptual stage, during the retention interval, or at the recognition phase. An Integrative Model of Eyewitness Testimony Both legal scholars and eyewitness testimony researchers have divided the cognitive and social processes as well as the factors affecting eyewitness testimony into three stages (Loftus, 1979; Sporer, 1982, 1984; Yarmey, 1979): (a) an acquisition, perception, or encoding stage, (b) a retention interval, and (c) a reproduction, recall, or recognition phase. Figure 1.1 displays an integrative model of eyewitness testimony proposed by Sporer (2008). At encoding, differences may emerge in the amount of information processed by elderly compared with young witnesses. A host of so-called estimator variables may affect later identification outcomes, for example, the stress and arousal experienced in a crime situation, the length of exposure to the target, or the time of day. Some of these factors may affect the elderly more than younger participants. For example, the elderly categorize themselves more frequently as “morning people” (which is supported by differences in circadian rhythms), which may put them at a disadvantage for crimes experienced at off-peak

Judgmental Level

Interrogator/“Memory Judge”: Attributions of Credibility/Accuracy

Reality Monitoring Confidence Judgment

MetaMemory Level Encoding

InformationProcessing Level

Context PERCEPTION PHASE

Rehearsal Integration Post-Event Information RETENTION PHASE

Retrieval/ Reconstruction Context

OBSERVABLE BEHAVIORS/ EVENTS

Internal Processes External Factors

RETRIEVAL PHASE

TIME

Figure 1.1 Integrative model of stages and processes involved in eyewitness testimony (from Sporer, 2008).

An Evidence-Based Review 7 times (see Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2007, for review, and Diges, Rubio, & Rodriguez, 1992, for an early study of time of day effects with young adults). Forgetting during the retention phase may affect memory of the elderly differently than that of younger people. At the retrieval phase, factors affecting performance of eyewitnesses, such as the use of unbiased versus biased instructions, or the presentation form of identification lineups (simultaneous vs. sequential) may also differentially affect the elderly compared with the young. Besides these three stages along the time continuum, we can also distinguish between different levels of information processing, particularly at the retrieval stage. Although most researchers have focused on the factors that determine the accuracy of recall and recognition at this stage, there is also a large body of research on the meta-memorial processes that accompany these retrieval processes. In particular, the expressed confidence accompanying recall and/or recognition may or may not be a reliable indicator of the accuracy of the details reported or of the accuracy of an identification. Elderly people may differ from younger ones not only by the amount and accuracy of their memory retrieval products but also in the confidence associated with these answers. At the judgment level, agents of the criminal justice system (police officers, attorneys) and triers of fact (jurors or judges) evaluate witness statements, having to decide whether they are reliable enough to base their decisions on them (e.g., pursue the prosecution of a suspect further, or decide on the guilt or innocence of a suspect). These evaluation processes are not only influenced by the witness statements as such but also by verbal utterances about meta-memorial processes and the accompanying nonverbal behavior. The purpose of this review is not to describe the factors that determine the relevant cognitive processes at the three stages at the three different levels but to focus on research findings that point to differences in these processes between people at old age and younger people. These differences may emerge in two ways: as main effects, that is, better recognition performance of younger people compared with the elderly, and as interactions between determinants of eyewitness testimony and age of witness, that is, certain factors may affect eyewitness identifications of old people differently than those of young people. In the next two sections, we describe the different methods and paradigms researchers have used to study person identification and face recognition as well as specific methodological issues involved in these general paradigms.

Person Identification Versus Recognition Paradigms Person Identification From Lineups or Photo Spreads In a typical eyewitness identification study, a participant-witness is involved in a mock crime (or a neutral interaction) with a target person or shown a film of such an interaction (see Figure 1.2). After some retention interval (delay) of

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Figure 1.2 Screenshot from a typical stimulus film of a theft (from Kaminski & Sporer, 2013).

minutes, days, or weeks, the mock witness is asked to identify the person seen in a (live) lineup or photo spread. A lineup is a procedure in which a witness is asked to conduct an identification task. A criminal suspect is placed among other, ideally similar-looking, people and shown to the witness (Wells & Olson, 2003). The suspect is not necessarily the culprit but can also be an innocent person. The other people are known-innocent members of the lineup and they are called foil, filler, or distractor. Depending on the presence of the culprit, there can be a culpritpresent or a culprit-absent lineup. In a culprit-present lineup, the culprit is placed among the fillers. In a culprit-absent lineup, an innocent person is placed among the fillers. In experiments the culprit is usually called target, and therefore the lineups are called target-present (TP) or target-absent (TA) lineups. An example of a TP lineup with an explicit option for the witness to respond “not present” is depicted in Figure 1.3. The outcome of the identification task depends on the presence of the culprit (Table 1.1). In a TP lineup the witness can identify the culprit (correct identification) or one of the fillers (false alarm [FA]) or reject the lineup incorrectly (incorrect rejection). In a TA lineup the witness can reject the lineup correctly (correct rejection) or make a false identification by selecting one of the foils. In real life, a filler identification would not result in charges against the person. However, if the suspect is an innocent person, the identification can wrongly result in a charge because of false evidence against the person. Such false identifications are the leading factor in wrongful convictions and contribute

An Evidence-Based Review 9

Figure 1.3 Lineup with explicit “0 = Tachter nicht vorhanden [perpetrator not present]” option (from Kaminski & Sporer, 2013).

Table 1.1 Outcomes of Lineup Decisions Witness choice Target presence

No choice

Absent

Correct rejection

Present

False rejection

Choice False ID of suspect (False alarm) Correct ID (Hit)

Foil ID (Known error) Foil ID (Known error)

to approximately 75% of the wrongful convictions in the United States, as reported by the Innocence Project (The Innocence Project, n.d.-a). Face Recognition Paradigm A face recognition paradigm is different from a lineup identification paradigm because it includes encoding of a face without an ongoing event. Typically, participants have to encode a series of faces, usually more than 20, and subsequently (after some filler activity) have to recognize the previously

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seen faces in a mix of “old” and “new” faces, usually twice the number of encoded faces. Encoding instructions imply intentional or incidental learning. Intentional encoding instructions tell participants to carefully study faces with the purpose of recognizing these faces afterward. Incidental encoding, on the other hand, typically involves other tasks than encoding, like rating the familiarity, pleasantness, or attractiveness of the faces or categorizing the faces into age groups. Therefore, participants do not know that they have to recognize these faces in a later stage of the experiment. After encoding the faces, participants are usually instructed to do some filler tasks, for example, filling out a questionnaire, or they continue immediately with the recognition task, in most cases a yes–no recognition task. In the yes–no recognition paradigm, participants see a random mix of target and new faces, presented one at a time. Because the set includes two kinds of faces, the possible responses are “yes” (I’ve seen the face before), or “no” (I haven’t seen the face before). Almost all studies reviewed in our metaanalysis used such a yes–no recognition paradigm (see Martschuk, Kocab, & Sporer, 2013). Comparison of the Two Paradigms The main focus in person identification by an eyewitness is on recognition of a previously seen face, which is shown among other faces in a (live) lineup or photo spread. And even if the terms lineup identification and face recognition often are used as synonyms, their meanings need to be distinguished from each other in the context of these two different research paradigms. In face recognition studies, the participants encode a set of faces before they have to recognize them from a larger set of already seen and new faces. In contrast, lineup identification studies examine not only the recognition of an already seen face but also the influence of a complex event (Sporer, 1992). A lineup identification task requires recognition of a person or a face that the witness saw at a particular place at a particular time. In experimental studies participants see a staged crime live or on video. The retention interval usually also includes a filler task, or participants return on a different day. In the recognition phase participants are asked to identify the target person (perpetrator) in an array of people (live lineup or photo spread), which may be presented simultaneously or sequentially. Before being presented with a lineup, participants are informed (unbiased instructions) or not informed that the perpetrator may or may not be in the lineup. Apart from the difference in the tasks, the paradigms require different aspects of memory. The identification task involves recognition of one (or a few) persons observed in a complex action sequence, where not only the face but also the whole person is shown in movement. The lineup task includes one target (or a replacement) person and five to 10 filler faces. In contrast, the

An Evidence-Based Review 11 face recognition paradigm measures memory for faces only, sometimes even with hair, neck, and shoulders covered or removed from the photograph. Dependent measures in face recognition experiments are usually evaluated according to signal detection theory (e.g., Donaldson, 1992; MacMillan & Creelman, 2005; see Sporer, 2001a, 2001b). The following outcomes are possible: hits, FAs, correct rejections, and incorrect rejections. The hit rate is the proportion of correctly recognized old faces; the FA rate is the proportion of new faces erroneously classified as “old.” Correct and incorrect rejections are merely their complements and hence redundant information. To separate discrimination performance from response bias, signal detection measures are often reported. The sensitivity or discriminability indices (d′; A′) are corrected measures presumed to be independent of a participant’s response tendency, combining hits and FAs. A positive d′ indicates that the hit rate is higher than the FA rate. A d′ = 0 implies discrimination is at chance level (see MacMillan & Creelman, 2005). Another measure, the response criterion (c or B″), expresses the response bias of the observer, that is, the tendency to consider faces as seen before. Negative c or B″ values denote a liberal tendency to say “yes”; “0” a neutral criterion; and positive values a conservative tendency, namely to say “no.” Extreme values of c occur when hits and FAs are both either large or small. One assumption that has guided our review is that performance in a recognition or identification paradigm is more likely to be affected by cognitive and memory factors, whereas response biases are affected by social psychological variables (see Sporer, 2001a, 2001b, for a similar assumption for the ownethnicity effect [own-race bias]). Signal detection theory is particularly suitable to better understand the differences between performance and response bias (see also Ebbesen & Flowe, 2002, for a provocative discussion with respect to sequential lineup testing). Measures of Effect Size As a measure of effect size for lineup identification studies, we report the odds ratio (OR; see Lipsey & Wilson, 2001; Sporer & Cohn, 2011). To normalize the distributions, ORs are usually log-transformed to LORs but back-transformed for better understanding when discussing results. For facial recognition studies we report Cohen’s d (or the unbiased estimate of the population parameter gu). Table 1.2 provides rough equivalents between these effect sizes for the less experienced reader. Equivalents to what Cohen (1988) denoted as “small,” “medium,” and “large” effects are emphasized in boldface type. These numbers are only rough guidelines and should be used with caution, comparing them with the effect sizes of other studies in the respective literature (e.g., on the cross-race effect, the effect of biased vs. unbiased instructions, simultaneous vs. sequential testing, or the relationship between person descriptions and identification performance).

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Table 1.2 Approximate Transformations between Effect Sizes OR, LOR, Cohen’s d, and Point-biserial r OR

LOR

ESd

ESr

1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50 3.00 3.50 4.00 4.50 5.00 5.50 6.00

0.00 0.41 0.69 0.92 1.10 1.25 1.39 1.50 1.61 1.70 1.79

0.00 0.22 0.38 0.51 0.61 0.69 0.76 0.83 0.89 0.94 0.99

0.00 0.11 0.19 0.24 0.29 0.33 0.36 0.38 0.41 0.43 0.44

Note. “Small,” “medium,” and “large” effect sizes according to Cohen’s (1988) recommendations are marked in bold face.

Results From Person Identification Studies Past reviews of the literature have usually taken a narrative approach, describing the individual outcomes of studies and their strengths and weaknesses and drawing theoretical and practical conclusions from the authors’ interpretation of the state of knowledge. For example, excellent reviews still worth reading have been conducted by Yarmey (1996, 2001) and more recently by Bartlett and Memon (2007). The latter review in particular meticulously analyzes outcomes of individual studies from both the person identification and face recognition literatures and relates them to basic research on the neuropsychology of aging; object recognition; and effortful, strategic processes of retrieval, decision-making, and monitoring processes of retrieval. The latter processes in turn are related to frontal brain systems known for deficits in older people (e.g., Balota Dolan, & Duchek, 2000; Henkel, Johnson, & De Leonardis, 1998). In contrast to narrative reviews, we rely here on two meta-analyses we conducted at the University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany. The first focuses exclusively on lineup studies (Kocab, Martschuk, & Sporer, 2013) and the second on facial recognition studies (Martschuk et al., 2013). The effect sizes for the lineup studies are reported as ORs or LORs. Although our review acknowledges cognitive and memory differences between younger and older witnesses (mean age above the age of 60), we also draw attention to meta-memorial decision-making processes when confronted with a lineup task as well as to alternative social psychological explanations in terms of participants’ choosing behavior. Furthermore, although past reviews were primarily qualitative in nature, our review draws on two recently completed meta-analyses of person identification and facial

An Evidence-Based Review 13 recognition studies (Kocab et al., 2013; Martschuk et al., 2013). Although Bartlett and Memon’s (2007) review contains some quantitative aspects, for example, relating the performance (hit rates and correct rejection rates) of the elderly to that of younger participants in the same studies, these correlational analyses do not take sample sizes of individual studies into account, which are at the heart of any quantitative synthesis (Lipsey & Wilson, 2001; Sporer & Cohn, 2011; J. C. Valentine, Cooper, & Hedges, 2009). Although meta-analyses generally are associative in nature, not allowing for causal conclusions, our meta-analyses utilized meta-regression analysis to search for potentially important moderator variables like exposure time, retention interval (delay), or type of lineup presentation (simultaneous vs. sequential). The advantage of meta-regression is that it controls statistically for other predictor variables in the model. Past meta-analyses in the eyewitness literature have used a series of pairwise comparisons of “blocks” of studies, which are often confounded with other predictor variables (e.g., when studies with longer exposure times also used longer retention intervals). Our hierarchical meta-regressions also control for the mean age of the old-age groups, which varied considerably from study to study. Main Findings We present only the major findings of our meta-analysis separately for overall correct decisions (across TP and TA lineups), hits and filler/false identifications in TP lineups (known errors), and filler identifications in TA lineups (for details, see Kocab et al., 2013). In addition, we present analyses of choosing rates (the sum of all positive identification responses, i.e., hits and filler identifications in TP plus filler identifications in TA lineups). Note that before conducting our weighted mean analyses, we screened data for any potential outliers adopting statistical methods developed by Hedges and Olkin (1985) as well as by graphical methods to assure that findings are not unduly affected by extreme values. Although many studies used both TP and TA lineups, results were not always reported separately, so k, that is, the number of studies these separate analyses are based on, vary from outcome to outcome. We first present results from analyses with studies using young targets, followed by studies with old targets, and finally direct comparisons of studies using both young and old targets (to test for an own-age effect). We located a total of 22 studies (including one unpublished; the study by Wright & Stroud, 2002, which used 35- to 55-year-olds as “elderly”, M = 45.0 years, was excluded) that reported sufficient information to calculate effect sizes on comparisons between elderly (mean age of 60 years and older) and younger groups. There were a total of 1,315 participants in the younger groups (M = 21.9 years; SD = 3.3) and 1,266 older participants (M = 69.9 years; SD = 6.0). All effect sizes were calculated so that an age effect (superior performance by younger people, i.e., more hits and fewer filler identifications) are denoted by LORs > 0, which correspond to ORs > 1.0 (see Table 1.2).

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Confidence intervals (95%) are reported in brackets, with values not including 0 for LORs or 1.0 for ORs, respectively, demonstrating significant effect sizes. Figure 1.4 displays the findings for young targets. Figure 1.4 displays the weighted mean averages of the LORs and the respective 95% confidence intervals for overall correct decisions, hits in TP lineups, filler identifications in TP lineups, identifications in TA lineups, and choosing rates in the meta-analysis of person identification studies (Kocab et al., 2013). After the outliers had been removed, results tended to be rather homogeneous (as indicated by Q tests), except for choosing rates. All effects were significant, with the smallest effect for hits (a small effect size as suggested by Cohen, 1988; see Table 1.2), and the largest effect for false identifications in TA lineups (a medium effect size). There was also a small to medium size effect for choosing. We draw particular attention to this effect, which has previously gone unnoticed in the literature. All results were in line with expectations. Younger adults were 2.1 times more likely to make a correct decision compared with their older counterparts, OR = 2.11 [1.71, 2.59]. Younger participants were 1.6 times more likely to pick

Figure 1.4 Mean effect sizes log-transformed odds ratios (confidence intervals) for young targets for overall correct decisions, hits in target-present (TP) lineups, filler identifications in TP lineups, and false identifications in target-absent (TA) lineups in person identification studies (data from meta-analysis by Kocab, Martschuk, & Sporer, 2013).

An Evidence-Based Review 15 the correct person from the TP lineup compared with the elderly, OR = 1.61 [1.25, 2.07]. The elderly were 2.5 times more likely to choose a filler from a TP lineup, OR = 2.45 [1.79, 3.36], and 3.1 times more likely to choose a wrong person from a TA lineup, OR = 3.07 [2.31, 4.09]. Choosing rates were 2.3 times higher with the elderly, OR = 2.26 [1.80, 2.84], with some variation across studies. Moderator Analyses Several individual studies have indicated that the age effect is not an all-or-noneaffair, with a specifiable “cut-off” value at a certain age, but may be observable as early as the 50s and gradually increases through the 80s (O’Rourke, Penrod, Cutler, & Stuve, 1989; Scogin, Calhoon, & d’Errico, 1994). Even though the study by Wright and Stroud (2002) was excluded from our meta-analysis, it found a reliable age effect for young faces, with the old-age group being no older than 35 to 55 in Experiment 1 and 40 to 55 in Experiment 2. To illustrate this pattern, Figure 1.5 shows the association of the mean age of the elderly group and the effect sizes for the correct decisions overall in our metaanalysis.1 With increasing age of the elderly age group, the effect sizes LOR show a linear increase.

Figure 1.5 Associations between mean age of the elderly groups and the effect sizes LOR for hits in TP lineups (data from Kocab, Martschuk, & Sporer, 2013).

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A frequently made assumption with elderly witnesses is that due to perceptual, attentional, and encoding deficits they should be less capable of encoding details of a crime, including the face of the perpetrator (McDowd & Shaw, 2000; Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2007; Wilcock, Bull, & Milne, 2008). Hence, we would expect the age effect to be stronger under poor encoding conditions. Our meta-regression analyses suggest a more differentiated conclusion, depending on the dependent measures analyzed. When controlling for mean age of the elderly group, retention interval, and mode of testing, longer exposure times (≥ 30 s) were associated with significantly more hits than when targets were exposed for shorter periods (< 30 s). On the other hand, older people also showed a marginally significant tendency to choose more often after longer exposures than after shorter encounters with the target. A possible interpretation of this latter finding draws on meta-cognitive aspects of witness decision making. To speculate, an elderly witness who may generally be not as confident as younger witnesses may nonetheless use the following heuristic strategy: “Considering that I have seen the perpetrator a sufficiently long time, I should be able to identify him/her.” Hence, the witness may be more likely to choose someone in the lineup, which usually goes along with an increase in hits. Of course, the hit rate will be dependent on the base rate of perpetrators being present in a lineup, which is usually 50% in simulation studies but is unknown in real criminal cases. Hit rates will also depend on other factors like distinctiveness of the target and lineup fairness. Another factor assumed to affect identification accuracy is the delay between target exposure and the lineup test. Although individual studies have shown general delay effects, it is not clear whether retention interval interacts with the age of participants in the sense that the elderly are more strongly affected by longer retention intervals. In our meta-regression analyses, there were no reliable associations between the age effect and delay (coded as < 24 hours [10 minutes to 11 hours] vs. ≥ 24 hours [1 day to 1 month]). Note, however, that most studies used rather short retention intervals of less than an hour, which may have prevented us from finding any reliable associations. Other factors possibly affecting witnesses during the retention interval could not be investigated as moderators in our meta-analysis because of the small number of studies in our database (Kocab et al., 2013). These factors include co-witness influence, misleading postevent information in the form of erroneous descriptions or misleading composites published in the media, or mug shot searches that did or did not contain the perpetrator. Although one might expect that the elderly are more susceptible to these influences than younger witnesses, empirical evidence for interaction effects with witness age is mixed (for reviews of individual studies, see Bartlett & Memon, 2007; Wilcock et al., 2008). Many of these factors are likely to affect younger and older eyewitnesses alike but under certain circumstances may have more pronounced effects with the elderly. A similar picture emerges for measures taken to improve identification performance by the elderly. In line with our findings on the prevalence of choosing among the elderly, the most promising methods are interventions that induce

An Evidence-Based Review 17 participants to adopt a more conservative decision criterion. Sequential lineups are likely to reduce choosing rates, which should go hand in hand with fewer false identifications but also (somewhat) fewer hits, as Ebbesen and Flowe (2002) have argued (see Meissner, Tredoux, & Parker, & MacLin, 2005, for empirical evidence). Our meta-regression did show sequential testing to be associated with a smaller age effect for choosing, that is, a tendency toward fewer choices by elderly compared with younger participants, but no reliable effect on any of the other measures. Unfortunately, some studies did not report data separately for simultaneous and sequential conditions (because of null findings), while others did not report data separately for TP and TA lineups, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions (see Memon & Gabbert, 2003b [mean age of older group = 68.9], 2003a [mean age of older group = 69.2]). Based on their review of individual studies, Mueller-Johnson and Ceci (2007) concluded that sequential lineups may not be a good idea for the elderly. We believe that the reduction in choosing observed for sequential lineups can be considered a beneficial effect but should be evaluated critically in light of signal detection approaches to sequential testing (Ebbesen & Flowe, 2002; Meissner et al., 2005). Other measures, like practice lineups and particularly various forms of unbiased instructions, have been found to reduce choosing rates and false identifications but not necessarily more so with elderly than with younger participants. A particular problem researchers have encountered here is that older participants may not remember the (unbiased) instructions, which in turn can obviously not help them in their decisions (Rose, Bull, & Vrij, 2003 [mean age of older group 72.4], 2005 [mean age of older group 70.7]; see also Wilcock, Bull, & Vrij, 2005 [mean age of older group 71.4]). Perhaps a clear response alternative in the lineup picture itself (see Figure 1.3) may be more helpful than written instructions alone. Old-Age Targets and the Own-Age Effect Although only seven lineup studies have tested age effects with older targets (e.g., perpetrators in a video) our meta-analysis showed consistent age effects for all dependent measures (see Figure 1.6). ORs for correct decisions, OR = 2.59 [1.85, 3.63]; hits, OR = 2.56 [1.63, 4.02]; filler identifications in TP lineups, OR = 2.74 [1.70, 4.41]; filler identifications in TA lineups, OR = 2.40 [1.49, 3.87]; and choosing rates, OR = 1.41 [1.00, 1.99] were all reliably larger than 1 as for the younger targets. Note, however, that any of these results may depend on the specific targets used in individual studies (e.g., some elderly target faces may have been more distinctive, lineups may have been less fair). To test for an own-age bias, that is, the tendency to perform better with targets (faces) of one’s own age group, a full crossover design with participants and targets of both age groups is necessary. There are only about a half dozen studies where both young and old targets were employed. Of course, in these

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Figure 1.6 Mean effect sizes LOR (CIs) for old targets for overall correct decisions, hits in TP lineups, filler identifications in TP lineups and false identifications in TA lineups in person identification studies (data from meta-analysis by Kocab, Martschuk, & Sporer, 2013).

studies it is extremely difficult to hold other factors like exposure time (e.g., the number of seconds the face is visible in a close-up), angle of view, etc. constant for young and old targets (which is very difficult regarding exposure times in staged events or lineup fairness; see Kocab et al., 2013). However, we believe that because of the limited stimulus sampling of all lineup identification studies, any such comparison is highly problematic. In the next section, where we discuss face recognition studies that all used at least 20 or more faces for each age group, this issue is more conclusively dealt with. Confidence–Accuracy Relationship Unfortunately, few studies have reported the confidence–accuracy (CA) relationship for older and younger participant groups. Also, different research groups have calculated the CA relationship using different correlation coefficients (point-biserial r, gamma) and for different groups of participants (overall CA relationship for all participants, CA for TP and TA lineups separately), making results not easily comparable. To our knowledge, only one study has reported the CA relationship for choosers (Wright & Stroud, 2002), which is the forensically most relevant relationship (Sporer, Penrod, Read, & Cutler,

An Evidence-Based Review 19 1995). Wright and Stroud (2002) observed significantly higher confidence ratings for correct than for incorrect choices for young as well as for older participants both for a 1-day and a 1-week delay. Associations tended to be higher for identifications by young participants than by the elderly. Potential differences in meta-memory aspects between older and younger witnesses are an intriguing finding that ought to be pursued further. However, analyses in future studies should be conducted separately for choosers and nonchoosers (Sporer et al., 1995) and supplemented by calibration analyses as advocated by Brewer and Wells (2006) and Sauerland and Sporer (2009). Similar analyses should also be conducted with response latencies (see Sauerland & Sporer, 2009; Sporer, 1992, 1993) and with questions for automatic versus deliberative decision-making processes (Dunning & Stern, 1994; Sauerland & Sporer, 2007). It is an open question whether introspective reports with elderly participants yield similar findings as with their younger counterparts. It may well be that the postdictive value of some of these marker variables may not be as diagnostic with the elderly as with younger participants. Such differences would be in line with studies on the cross-race effect, where CA and latency–accuracy relationships were not as reliable with out-group faces as with in-group faces (Smith, Lindsay, Pryke, & Dysart, 2001; Smith, Stinson, & Prosser, 2004; Sporer, 2001a, 2001b). Parallel results might be expected with faces of one’s own group versus faces of differently age groups discussed subsequently. Considering that the elderly may be cooperative with the police because of their more positive attitude toward the criminal justice system, they may also be more likely to be affected by feedback from police officers and other criminal justice officials. We are aware of only one study having investigated the socalled postidentification effect (Wells & Bradfield, 1998) with elderly witnesses (59–97 years [Experiment 1], and 57–86 years [Experiment 2]) and younger witnesses (17–32 years [Experiment 1], and 18–36 years [Experiment 2]; Neuschatz et al., 2005). Elderly and younger witnesses alike showed inflated confidence and retrospectively rated several questions relating to the original perception of the crime higher than the no-feedback control. Therefore, we find it important that the original identification procedure be captured on videotape (or at least audiotape) to be later scrutinized by triers of fact (Sporer, 1993). Whether such videotaping procedures affect elderly different from younger people is an open empirical question. Earwitnesses Just as there may be particular problems of encoding and remembering faces with elderly eyewitnesses because of sensory, attentional, and encoding deficits, memory for voices may also be debilitated (for review, see MuellerJohnson & Ceci, 2007). To our knowledge, there are only two studies that have compared younger and older participants regarding their performance on voice lineups. Bull and Clifford (1984) found younger witnesses (between 21 and

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40) to outperform witnesses over 40 years of age on a voice lineup task (no comparison is reported with a third group of 16- to 20-year-olds). The authors also reported a decrease in performance when more voices were in the lineup, which affected both younger and older adults (five voices: 25% vs. 42%; seven voices: 17% vs. 30%; nine voices: 18% vs. 17%; chance 11%). Eriksson et al. (2010, Experiment 2) investigated the effect of a series of factors affecting voice recognition in a laboratory simulation (dialect, gender, hearing status), and age of listeners with a large sample (160 age 21–40; 134 over 60). We have calculated the effect size d for the recognition performance of younger and elderly listeners. On average, the elderly performed worse overall, d = −0.32, particularly in the unexpected topic condition, d = −0.48, and slightly worse than the younger group in the expected topic condition, d = −0.16. Older participants who had attended a hearing clinic did not differ from participants who had not signed up with the clinic. In sum, older participants may not only perform worse on visual lineups but also on voice lineups. An important factor to consider may be background noise and voices rather high or rather low in pitch (see Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2007, for further discussion).

Results From Face Recognition Studies Major Findings in Face Recognition Studies The following section presents the main findings in our meta-analysis of facial recognition studies (Martschuk et al., 2013). We located 18 published studies that met the inclusion criteria, with overall n = 559 young participants (M = 20.5 years) and n = 601 elderly participants (M = 70.1 years). Separate analyses were conducted for young, mixed-age (results for young and old faces not reported separately), and old faces for the dependent measures hits, FAs, and recognition performance (d′ or A′). Analyses of response bias measures were conducted for mixed faces only because of a lack of information for young and old faces. To test for an own-age bias, separate analyses were conducted contrasting studies that presented young and old faces and reported results separately. The unbiased estimate of the standardized mean difference, Hedges gu, was used as effect size measure. The mean weighted effect sizes (and the 95% confidence intervals) for all dependent measures are presented in Figure 1.7. A positive gu denotes superior performance by younger people, a negative gu superior performance of older people. Prior to calculating mean effect sizes, outlier analyses were conducted to locate extreme outliers for each effect size measure. With young faces, there was a significant difference between young and old participants in hits, FAs, and recognition performance in favor of young participants. There was a medium effect for hits and a large effect for FAs, demonstrating that young people were not only better in recognizing previously seen faces, gu = 0.57 [0.36, 0.77], but also less likely to choose a new

An Evidence-Based Review 21

Figure 1.7 Mean effect sizes gu (CIs) for hits, false alarms, performance measures (d', A') and response bias (beta, B″ ) in studies with young faces, mixed (young and old), and old faces (Martschuk, Kocab, & Sporer, 2013).

face as previously seen, gu = 1.00 [0.79, 1.22], than their older counterparts. Accordingly, younger participants demonstrated a significantly better recognition performance than the elderly, with a large effect size, gu = 1.35 [1.08, 1.62]. However, the latter measure is based on three studies only, compared with six studies for hits and FAs. In contrast, there were no differences in hit rates between the age groups when they had to recognize faces of old targets. Younger and older participants were similar in hits, gu = 0.13 [−0.10, 0.35]. However, older participants were much more likely to falsely choose a new face than their younger counterparts, gu = 0.78 [0.55, 1.02]. Accordingly, results showed a medium effect for recognition performance (d′; A′) in favor of younger participants, gu = 0.47 [0.18, 0.76]. Even if older participants were as likely as young participants to recognize previously seen faces, they were much more likely to falsely choose a new face, resulting in an overall worse recognition performance of older than younger people. Results based on studies that presented faces of different ages together (here referred to as mixed faces) without reporting the results separately demonstrated an overall better performance of young people compared with old people. There was a small effect for hits, gu = 0.25 [0.08, 0.24], but a large effect for FAs,

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gu = 1.10 [0.91, 1.29]. Here again, young participants showed significantly better recognition performance compared with the elderly, gu = 0.88 [0.70, 1.06]. Moreover, the results demonstrated that older participants employed a much more lenient decision criterion than their younger counterparts as demonstrated by the measure of response bias, gu = 0.66 [0.46, 0.87]. Own-Age effect To test for an own-age bias, hit and FA rates for young and old targets were compared, using only data from studies that compared both face age groups in the same experiment (see Figure 1.8 for FA rates). Contrary to expectations, the results demonstrated that—independently of face age—young participants were more likely to recognize previously seen faces correctly and less likely to falsely identify a new face as a previously seen face. However, the overall effect size for hits as well as FAs decreased with increased face age. The effect size for hit rates was large to medium when presented with young faces, gu = 0.74 [0.53, 0.94], and small to medium when presented with old faces, gu = 0.35 [0.15, 0.55].

Figure 1.8 Effect sizes gu for the old-age effect for false alarms of older and younger target faces in face recognition studies (Martschuk, Kocab, & Sporer, 2013).

An Evidence-Based Review 23 However, even if the effect size decreased for FAs with increased face age, young participants were still, by more than 1 standard deviation, less likely to mistake a new face as a previously seen face, with gu = 1.32 [1.10, 1.54] for young faces, and gu = 1.02 [0.81, 1.24] for old faces. Overall, even if the data do not clearly support an own-age bias, the decrease in effect sizes with increasing face age demonstrates that the differences between the age groups are smaller with elderly faces than with young faces. These results support previous findings that target age impacts face recognition memory, as shown in the meta-analysis on the own-age bias in face recognition across the life span (Rhodes & Anastasi, 2012). However, in contrast to the current meta-analysis, Rhodes and Anastasi (2012) measured the overall effect sizes for age groups over the whole life span, from childhood to old adulthood. Further, they combined lineup identification, face recognition, forced choice, and associative recognition studies in their meta-analysis, which may involve different decision processes. Thus, their meta-analysis is not directly comparable with ours. Change of Appearance in Face Recognition Studies Many paradigms testing face recognition memory use identical stimuli at the encoding and the recognition phase. However, faces are not static objects; their appearance changes in pose, expression, or even tint from situation to situation. Further, use of makeup or changes in hairstyle cause a face to appear different. These factors are of importance for identification outcomes because these changes may negatively affect identification accuracy. In addition, emotional expression may make a face appear different, which is of importance, for example, regarding differences in expression of the offender at the time of the offence and the lineup procedures (e.g., aggressive vs. neutral or anxious). It is assumed that older people may have more problems recognizing a face with a different appearance because of changes in sensory and memory system, as described earlier in this chapter. Some of the studies in the face recognition meta-analysis included this issue in their research: Participants were presented photographs where expression, pose, or both were identical or changed between encoding and recognition. The results for hits and FAs for young and mixed identical versus changed faces are presented in Figure 1.9. Because of the small number of studies, young and mixed faces were combined. There was a medium-size effect for hit rates in both sets of studies, showing no differences between faces presented identically, gu = 0.48 [0.36, 0.61], and changed at test, gu = 0.50 [0.30, 0.69]. However, there were large differences between the effect sizes in FA rates: Performance by the elderly was much worse when face appearance was changed at test, gu = 1.10 [0.90, 1.29], compared with identical presentation of faces, gu = 0.93 [0.79, 1.07]. Accordingly, old people may have more problems distinguishing between new and old faces when face appearance has changed, even if the changes in appearance are small. Unfortunately, we do not know

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Figure 1.9 Mean effect sizes gu (CIs) for hits and false alarms for young and mixed faces identical vs. changed at test (Martschuk, Kocab, & Sporer, 2013).

to what extent identical appearance (e.g., a particular hairstyle similar for the real perpetrator and an innocent suspect) may create an illusion of familiarity resulting in a negative response bias.

Research Limitations As has become clear both from the person identification and face recognition studies, the biggest problems are age effects regarding false identifications/ FAs, which appear to be a function of the increased choosing rates of elderly witnesses. We need to better understand what makes elderly witnesses choose someone from a lineup. Although we can only know the accuracy of an identification in simulation studies where the true perpetrator is known, laboratory and field studies ought to be supplemented by archival analyses, where data from witnesses of different age groups are compared (see T. Valentine, Pickering, & Darling, 2003). Although some studies using lineup identification tasks have assessed CA relationships (e.g., Memon, Hope, Bartlett, & Bull, 2002) the results have been reported in many different ways, using different correlation coefficients. Some studies have reported correlations across the whole sample and some separately for TP and TA lineups, but to our knowledge, none has reported separate

An Evidence-Based Review 25 analyses for choosers and nonchoosers. As the meta-analysis by Sporer et al. (1995) has shown, the CA relationship is considerably higher for choosers than for nonchoosers (see also Lindsay, Nilsen, & Read, 2000, for even higher correlations). Whether similar relationships will be found with elderly witnesses remains an unanswered question. Also, analyzing the probative value of confidence judgments via confidence calibration (Sauerland & Sporer, 2009; Brewer & Weber, 2010) rather than CA relationships still has to be tested with elderly witnesses. Additionally, whether response latencies may be as useful as postdictors as with younger adults is still awaiting investigation (cf. Sauerland & Sporer, 2009). We may expect overall slower decision times with elderly compared with younger adults, but whether their diagnostic value is similarly useful as with younger adults remains an empirical question. In general, more research on these meta-memory aspects of identifications (see Figure 1.1) as well as on other meta-cognitive aspects of lineup decisions seems desirable.

Implications for Practice and Recommendations Many of the problems encountered with elderly eyewitnesses are not new with this age group but have been addressed in studies that have attempted to find remedies to reduce false identifications. It is worth noting that the literature on children’s lineup identification attempts has faced very similar problems (for review, see Pozzulo, 2007). Parallel to the arguments presented here, both more cognitively oriented explanations and more socially oriented explanations and remedies have been sought. In particular, presenting a child, or an elderly person, with a group of photographs, appears to pose task demands (e.g., Gross & Hayne, 1996) that imply that the perpetrator is present and all witnesses have to do is pick “the right one.” Hence, the importance of unbiased lineups and unbiased, fair instructions is self-evident. However, unbiased instructions may not be understood by the elderly as easily or in the same way as by younger adults. Hence, specific instructions have to be tested both in laboratory and in field settings. An additional measure, which we have routinely used in our own research (e.g., Sauerland & Sporer, 2009; Sporer, Davids, Kaminski, & McQuiston, 2012), is to make a “not present” option explicitly visible in the layout of a photo spread (see Figure 1.3). Along with the instruction that the perpetrator may or may not be present in the lineup, the option 0 = Not Present clearly signals to the witness that not only the numbers 1 to 6 but also a lineup rejection may be a correct and hence an appropriate answer. Along these lines, specifically designed and tested practice lineups may be useful. For any such research on system variables, it is important that elderly people’s understanding is pilot tested. Also, manipulation checks and specifically designed tests of memory for the instructions before a lineup should be a regular part of research (and practice) to assure that these procedures may work (see Wilcock et al., 2005). Perhaps a combination of sequential (as opposed to the traditional simultaneous) lineups along with specifically designed instructions for the elderly may reduce the heightened tendency of

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the elderly to choose somebody in the lineup. However, care must be taken that this is not at the cost of reduced hit rates. Furthermore, research should explore the possibility of physical context reinstatement (e.g., by showing photographs of the setting or objects present at the scene of the crime; cf. Krafka & Penrod, 1985). However, we warn practitioners that such procedures may backfire in so far as an elderly (or any vulnerable witness) may reexperience the trauma of the crime situation, which would debilitate rather than facilitate recall and recognition. Along a similar vein, the use of the Cognitive Interview, which generally does not seem to work with person identifications (Fisher, McCauley, & Geiselman, 1994), could have negative side effects in the field that may not become apparent in laboratory simulations. Other memory-enhancing procedures, like closing one’s eyes to visualize the original event (e.g., Vredeveldt, Hitch, & Baddeley, 2011) have not yet been tested with respect to identification procedure. One form of context reinstatement procedure that should be tested with elderly participants is rereading one’s own person description prior to an identification. As Sporer (2007) has argued, rereading one’s description that has been given days before an identification procedure may provide retrieval cues that may facilitate identification accuracy. Empirical evidence for this proposal, which runs counter to the well-known verbal overshadowing effect (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990) has been presented with young adults at different, relatively long retention intervals of 2 days and 5 weeks (Sporer et al., 2012). Rereading their own description improved correct decisions by over 20% compared with a no-description control group. It should be particularly interesting to see whether elderly witnesses, whose verbal skills may be at least as good or perhaps even superior to those of younger adults, will also profit from such a rereading procedure. Some of these factors we have outlined may show interesting interactions with the age of the witness. For example, it is an open question whether differences in circadian rhythm observed with elderly witnesses (who are more likely to be “morning persons”; see Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2007) would differentially affect older and younger witnesses when their memory is tested in a lineup at different times of day. We already mentioned the possibility that time of day, in combination with age differences in circadian rhythms, may affect encoding, which in turn may influence subsequent recall and recognition. These questions should not only be considered in research but also in practice when witnesses are asked to participate in a person identification task. Finally, we emphasize again that there are no clear-cut boundaries or cut-off values for “old age.” This also became evident in our meta-analysis on identification studies when we looked at diagnosticity ratios in individual studies. Diagnosticity is defined as the ratio of correct identifications in TP lineups (hits) divided by the false identifications in TA lineups (which are divided by lineup size; Clark, Howell, Davey, 2008; Wells & Lindsay, 1980). Figure 1.10 contrasts diagnositicity ratios (unweighted by size of study) in 11 studies for which both hits and false identification ratios were available. As Figure 1.10

An Evidence-Based Review 27

Figure 1.10 Diagnosticity ratios for young and old participants as a function of the mean age of the old-age groups in 11 studies with both TP and TA lineups.

shows, diagnosticity ratios of the elderly are relatively lower compared with those of younger participants in the same studies. Remarkably, in studies with the elderly groups aged 71 and older on average, the differences in diagnosticity ratios became increasingly larger (except for the study by Scogin et al., 1974, mean age = 74, where we averaged results across the two groups of elderly). This differential pattern of diagnosticity ratios implies that better identification results would have been possible, as demonstrated by the younger participants, but the elderly were unable to match the younger participants’ performance.

Evaluating Evidence by Elderly Eyewitnesses At the beginning of this chapter we presented an integrative model of eyewitness testimony (see Sporer, 2008). The model distinguishes between perceptual, retention, and retrieval phases as many authors have done before (e.g., Yarmey, 2001). Most of the research on eyewitness testimony has dealt with the factors operating at these three stages. We have only reviewed here factors affecting the elderly’s identification decisions, not the literature on eyewitness recall

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(person and event descriptions) by elderly witnesses (see Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2007; Yarmey, 2001), suggestibility (e.g., Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2004), or interview techniques (e.g., Wright & Holliday, 2005). Our model also differentiates between three memory levels: the informationprocessing level at the base, the meta-memory level, and the judgment level. We have discussed research deficits at the meta-memory level in the previous section of this chapter, but we should add here that the style and type of interviewing as well as the content of the questions asked may affect elderly witnesses’ responses differently from younger witnesses. It is the complexity of the interplay of these three levels—as indicated by the upward and downward arrows in the model—which ought to be investigated in more detail. In our view, the judgment level (also referred to as meta-memory level by Wells & Lindsay, 1983; see also Wells, 1984) has received too little attention in the past. In his pioneering work, Leippe (1984) noted the importance of witness attributes, questioning factors, and witnessing conditions as well as the influence of fact-finders’ beliefs, message content, and delivery style on fact-finders’ evaluations of identification decisions. Leippe’s focus was primarily on differences between children and adults as witnesses, but many of his arguments apply to elderly witnesses as well. As the research on confidence inflation as a function of postidentification feedback shows, the interplay of the meta-memory and judgment level may affect how witnesses will testify in court and consequently, how fact-finders (jurors, judges, and experts) will use this information in their confidence-accuracy attributions. To conclude, we now address some specific issues at the judgment level. We link the social psychological literature on perceptions and stereotypes of the elderly to the evaluation of (identification) testimony. Police, attorneys, judges, and jurors are all confronted with witnesses and will draw conclusions about their memory ability in a given case, here the accuracy of an identification decision. We further distinguish between memory accuracy and credibility (in relation to perceived honesty), which may be affected differently by these attitudes and stereotypes. Perceptions of Elderly Witnesses When older witnesses are interviewed by the police or appear before court, the question arises to what extent they are more likely to be believed (credibility) than younger witnesses. Participants in the criminal justice system (police officers, attorneys, experts, judges, and juries) may base their evaluations on general perceptions of elderly versus young people as well as their stereotypes and attitudes toward them. These attitudes and stereotypes may involve biases, which in turn may affect these decision makers’ evaluations, and consequently even verdicts, in a given case. It is noteworthy that recent studies have made more fine-grained distinctions between young-old and old-old seniors similar to the general gerontology literature and some of the studies on identification witnesses reviewed here.

An Evidence-Based Review 29 A comprehensive meta-analysis of studies investigating attitudes toward the elderly and age stereotypes found that negative traits relevant for eyewitness evaluations are more likely attributed to elderly people (e.g., being hard of hearing, having memory failure, or generally having less intelligence or ability; Kite, Stockdale, Whitley, & Johnson, 2005). Important for our present discussion, increasing the amount of information provided about a target reduced the perceived age differences. This has to be kept in mind when evaluating studies on age stereotypes and the evaluation of witnesses. Additional aspects have to be distinguished, namely, perceived accuracy versus perceived honesty. The distinction refers to a general problem of eyewitness testimony any evaluator has to be aware of: error and deception (Sporer, 2008). Sometimes witnesses may want to report the “truth,” but because of perceptual and memory problems or as a consequence of inappropriate questioning or lineup techniques, they are unable to do so. On the other hand, witnesses may intentionally distort the truth, that is, lie or deceive others to protect themselves or somebody else. This distinction also applies to stereotype-based perceptions of the elderly as witnesses (e.g., MuellerJohnson, Toglia, Sweeney, & Ceci, 2007). For example, in one study an older eyewitness (aged 82) was rated as more honest but less competent than a 28-year-old witness (e.g., Kwong See, Hoffman, & Wood, 2001; cf. also Ross, Dunning, Toglia, & Ceci, 1990). However, we must suggest caution regarding studies using only a single or a few stimulus persons (sometimes only a photograph is shown) because the results may depend on idiosyncrasies of the appearance and behavior of the person evaluated and his or her testimony (a problem referred to as stimulus sampling; Wells & Windschitl, 1999).2 For example, mere variations in facial aging cues may trigger more positive stereotypes for young-old people or more negative stereotypes for old-old people (Hummert, 1994). In another study, Brimacombe, Jung, Garrioch, and Allison (2003) found old-old witnesses (M = 78.5 years) to be less accurate than younger adults (M = 19.8 years) and young-old witnesses (M = 67.7 years). However, the old-old witnesses were more verbose in their testimony, particularly when the context was familiar. Participant-jurors regarded the videotaped testimonies of the different age groups as equally credible. In an earlier study, Brimacombe et al. (1997) had observed that negative evaluations of older witnesses (aged 65 to 85; M = 71.2 years) were associated with negative qualifiers. It is possible that differences in the powerfulness or powerlessness of speech style may be responsible for these findings (cf. the law-and-language project on the attribution of credibility by O’Barr and colleagues; e.g., O’Barr & Lind, 1981). Other studies found conflicting evidence regarding the perceptions of accuracy and/or competence (for reviews, see Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2007; Yarmey, 2001). Perceived gender differences, the role a stimulus person has in society (e.g., retiree vs. still actively employed person), and even the type of living arrangement (senior home vs. self-responsible living arrangement) may moderate the perceptions of elderly witnesses. Nonetheless, a recent review

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suggests that overall the number of negative stereotypes entertained exceed that of positive stereotypes (Hummert, 2011). Other aspects of stereotypes that may operate at various stages in criminal justice procedures cannot be elaborated here (see Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2007). These stereotypes and attitudes may affect not only perceptions of elderly witnesses (both consciously and implicitly or automatically) but also manifest themselves in “patronizing” behavior by police officers and other criminal justice personnel interviewing elderly witnesses. Although patronizing behavior has primarily been studied in health care and community settings, similar interactions may occur in criminal justice procedures (Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2007). Portraying a negative attitude toward an elderly witness may decrease communication, self-esteem, and confidence (which in turn may affect the CA relationships discussed in the meta-memory section earlier). The attitude communicated by an interrogator to elderly witnesses may induce stereotype threat (Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002), making them perform worse than they might actually be able to, including performance on memory tests (Hess, Auman, Colcombe, & Rahhal, 2003). Perhaps being more patient and removing time constraints in responding may alleviate some of these negative effects (for an excellent review of these issues, see Hummert, 2011). Finally, age differences may play a role not only when evaluating old versus young witnesses but may also exist between fact-finders of different ages. Elderly fact-finders (e.g., jurors) may hold more negative stereotypes toward certain types of witnesses (e.g., those of a different ethnic group) or of a different age, perhaps demonstrating another type of own-age bias. Last but not least, attributions of accuracy and credibility could be explained by dual process theories as in the work on credibility attribution and detection of deception by Reinhard and colleagues (e.g., Reinhard, Sporer, Scharmach, & Marksteiner, 2011). Attentional deficits; motivation to process information; need for cognition and need for closure; and last but not least, situational familiarity as demonstrated in these studies may all affect elderly decision makers differently from young fact-finders, particularly jurors. But this is another story.

Conclusion Although we have painted a rather dim picture of the elderly as witnesses, who might perform even worse in eyewitness recall tasks than in recognition tasks like person identification, we would like to emphasize that cognitive aging is a gradual process and much under the control of individuals. Consequently, there is much interindividual variation in all cognitive, memorial, and decision-making ability involved in identification decisions. As emphasized repeatedly, finer distinctions between different old-age groups, as well as information about health status, their current activities, social roles, and settings (senior home vs. community), should be made. These differences have to be taken into consideration when dealing with individual cases. Meta-analyses can only summarize the overall picture, depending on the studies available and the number of details reported. Similar meta-analyses

An Evidence-Based Review 31 as presented here on identification and facial recognition studies have to be conducted on old-age effects of witness recall (person and event descriptions), postevent information and suggestibility, and the CA relationship. But a word of caution is also in order. Although we favor evidence-based syntheses over narrative reviews, some of the drawbacks of meta-analyses also should be mentioned. In general, meta-analyses allow causal conclusions only to a very limited extent. Efforts must be taken to design specific procedures to improve eyewitness identifications not only by elderly but by all vulnerable witnesses. These procedures have to be tested empirically both in the laboratory and in the field, and the cumulative evidence should be integrated again meta-analytically to arrive at the best evidence-based practice. Finally, we must not forget that eyewitnesses of violent crimes often experience enormous stress and arousal. These issues have not, and cannot, be studied in simulation studies. Hence, archival analyses of criminal cases should be consulted as well to arrive at a full picture.

Notes 1. To plot this graph we excluded the study by O’Rourke at al. (1989), in which the mean age of the elderly was approximately 60 years. Actually, the study by O’Rourke et al. by itself shows an almost linear decrease in correct decisions across categories, r = −.96, from participants in the age groups 18 to 19 (51%), 20 to 29 (47%), 30 to 39 (46%), 40 to 49 (42%), 50 to 59 (29%), and 60 to 72 (25%). However, this unweighted correlation between the mean group age and the mean group accuracy clearly overestimates this relationship because it ignores interindividual variations within each group. At the individual level, older witnesses (M = 35% at 1 SD above mean age in this study) were significantly less often correct than younger participants (M = 52%, d = −0.37; r = −.18). A reanalysis of data from a field study by Sauerland and Sporer (2009) with N = 720 participants also showed a large negative correlation between mean age group categories and the group mean of correct decisions, r = −.72. Using individual participants as the unit of analysis, there was only a small but significant negative point-biserial correlation of correct decisions with age of individual participants, r(718) = −.10, p = .007. 2. In Experiment 2, Ross et al. (1990) somewhat addressed this problem by using transcripts of the trial where visual ageing cues cannot affect evaluations. Nonetheless, witness reports may be evaluated differently when the age of a witness is known. These examples illustrate the difficulties of trade-offs between ecological validity (by videotaping a whole trial) and stimulus sampling (e.g., by using multiple photographs along with a trial transcript, or by using multiple videotapes of witnesses as in the study by Brimacombe, Quinton, Nance, & Garrioch, 1997).

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An Evidence-Based Review 35 Mueller-Johnson, K., & Ceci, S. J. (2004). Memory and suggestibility in older adults. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1109–1127. Mueller-Johnson, K., & Ceci, S. J. (2007). The elderly eyewitness: A review and prospectus. In M. P. Toglia, J. D. Read, D. F. Ross, & R. C. L. Lindsay (Eds.), Handbook of eyewitness psychology. Vol. 1: Memory for events (pp. 577–603). New York, NY: Erlbaum. Mueller-Johnson, K., Toglia, M. P., Sweeney, C. D., Ceci, S. J. (2007). The perceived credibility of older adults as witnesses and its relation to ageism. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 25, 355–375. Naveh-Benjamin, M. Guez, J. Kilb, A., & Reedy, S. (2004). The associative memory deficit of older adults: Further support using face-name associations. Psychology and Aging, 19, 541–546. Neuschatz, J. S., Preston, E. L., Burkett, A.D., Toglia, M. P., Lampinen, J. M., Neuschatz, J. S., . . . Goodsell, C. A. (2005). The effects of post-identification feedback and age on retrospective eyewitness memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 435–453. doi:10.1002/acp.1084 O’Barr, W. M., & Lind, E. A. (1981). Ethnography and experimentation: Partners in legal research. In B. D. Sales (Ed.), The trial process (pp. 181–207). New York, NY: Plenum Press. O’Rourke, T. E., Penrod, S. D., Cutler, B. L., & Stuve, T. E. (1989). The external validity of eyewitness identification research: Generalizing across subject populations. Law and Human Behavior, 13, 385–395. Palmer, M. A., Brewer, N., McKinnon, A. C., & Weber, N. (2010). Phenomenological reports diagnose accuracy of eyewitness identification decisions. Acta Psychologica, 133, 137–145. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2009.11.002 Park, D.C., Lautenschlager, G., Hedden, T., Davidson, N. S., Smith, A.D., & Smith, P. K. (2002). Models of visuospatial and verbal memory across the adult life span. Psychology and Aging, 17, 229–320. Park, D.C., & Reuter-Lorenz, P. (2009). The adaptive brain: Aging and neurocognitive scaffolding. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 173–196. Pozzulo, J. (2007). Person descriptions and identification by child witnesses. In M. P. Toglia, J. D. Read, D. F. Ross, & R. C. L. Lindsay (Eds.), Handbook of eyewitness psychology: Vol. 2. Memory for people (pp. 283–307). New York, NY: Erlbaum. Reinhard, M. A., Sporer, S. L., Scharmach, M., & Marksteiner, T. (2011). Listening, not watching: Situational familiarity and the ability to detect deception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 467–484. doi:10.1037/a0023726 Rhodes, M. G., & Anastasi, J. S. (2012). The own-age bias in face recognition: A metaanalytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 146–174. Rose, R. A., Bull, R., & Vrij, A. (2003). Enhancing older witnesses’ identification performance: Context reinstatement is not the answer. Canadian Journal of Police and Security Services, 1, 173–184. Rose, R. A., Bull, R., & Vrij, A. (2005). Non-biased lineup instructions do matter: A problem for older witnesses. Psychology, Crime & Law, 11, 147–159. Ross, D. F., Dunning, D., Toglia, M. P., & Ceci, S. J. (1990). Assessing mock jurors’ perceptions of child witness. Law and Human Behavior, 14, 5–23. Sauerland, M., & Sporer, S. L. (2007). Post-decision confidence, decision time, and self-reported decision processes as postdictors of identification accuracy. Psychology, Crime, & Law, 13, 611–625.

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Sauerland, M., & Sporer, S. L. (2009). Fast and confident: Postdicting eyewitness identification accuracy in a field study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15, 46–62. doi:10.1037/a0014560 Schooler, J. W., & Engstler-Schooler, T. Y. (1990). Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: Some things are better left unsaid. Cognitive Psychology, 22, 36–71. Scogin, F., Calhoon, S. K., & D’Errico, M. (1994). Eyewitness confidence and accuracy among three age cohorts. The Journal of Applied Gerontology, 13, 172–184. Smith, S. M., Lindsay, R. C. L., Pryke, S., & Dysart, J. E. (2001). Postdictors of eyewitness errors: Can false identifications be diagnosed in the cross-race situation? Psychology Public Policy and Law, 7, 153–169. Smith, S. M., Stinson, V., & Prosser, M. A. (2004). Do they all look alike? An exploration of decision-making strategies in cross-race facial identifications. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science–Revue Canadienne des Sciences du Comportement, 36, 146–154. Sporer, S. L. (1982). A brief history of the psychology of testimony. Current Psychological Reviews, 2, 323–339. Sporer, S. L. (1984). Experimentalpsychologische Grundlagen der Personenidentifizierung [Experimental psychological foundations of the psychology of person identification]. Monatsschrift fuer Kriminologie and Strafrechtsreform, 67, 339–348. Sporer, S. L. (1992). Das Wiedererkennen von Gesichtern [Recognizing faces]. Weinheim, Germany: Beltz/Psychologie Verlags Union. Sporer, S. L. (1993). Eyewitness identification accuracy, confidence, and decision times in simultaneous and sequential lineups. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 22–33. Sporer, S. L. (2001a). The cross-race effect: Beyond recognition of faces in the laboratory. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 7, 1–18. Sporer, S. L. (2001b). Recognizing faces of other ethnic groups: An integration of theories. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 7, 36–97. Sporer, S. L. (2007). Person descriptions as retrieval cues: Do they really help? Psychology, Crime, & Law, 13, 591–609. Sporer, S. L. (2008). Lessons from the origins of eyewitness testimony research in Europe. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22, 737–757. doi:10.1002/acp.1479 Sporer, S. L., & Cohn, L. D. (2011). Meta-analysis. In B. Rosenfeld & S. D. Penrod (Eds.), Research methods in psychology (pp. 43–62). New York, NY: Wiley. Sporer, S. L., Davids, M. C., Kaminski, K. S., & McQuiston, D. (2012, March). Re-reading brings your memory back: The end of verbal overshadowing? Paper presented at the American Psychology and Law Society Conference, Caribe Hilton, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sporer, S. L., Penrod, S. D., Read, J. D., & Cutler, B. L. (1995). Choosing, confidence, and accuracy: A meta-analysis of the confidence–accuracy relation in eyewitness identification studies. Psychological Bulletin, 118, 315–327. Steele, C. M., Spencer, S., & Aronson, J. (2002). Contending with group image: The psychology of stereotype and social identity threat. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 34, pp. 379–440). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Tulving, E. (2000). Concepts of memory. In E. Tulving & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of memory (pp. 33–43). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Valentine, J. C., Cooper, H., & Hedges, L. V. (Eds.). (2009). The handbook of research synthesis and meta-analysis (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

An Evidence-Based Review 37 Valentine, T., Pickering, A., & Darling, S. (2003). Characteristics of eyewitness identification that predict the outcome of real lineups. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17, 969–993. Vredeveldt, A., Hitch, G. J., & Baddeley, A. D. (2011). Eyeclosure helps memory by reducing cognitive load and enhancing visualisation. Memory & Cognition, 39, 1253–1263. doi:10.3758/s13421–011–0098–8 Wells, G. L. (1984). How adequate is human intuition for judging eyewitness testimony? In G. L. Wells & E. L. Loftus (Eds.), Eyewitness testimony: Psychological perspectives (pp. 256–272). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Wells, G. L., & Bradfield, A. L. (1998). “Good, you identified the suspect”: Feedback to eyewitnesses distorts their reports of the witnessing experience. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 360–376. Wells, G. L., & Lindsay, R. C. L. (1980). On estimating the diagnosticity of eyewitness non-identifications. Psychological Bulletin, 88, 776–784. doi:10.1037/ 0033–2909.88.3.776 Wells, G. L., & Lindsay, R. C. L. (1983). How do people infer the accuracy of eyewitness memory? Studies of performance and a metamemory analysis. In S. Lloyd-Bostock & B. R. Clifford (Eds.), Evaluating witness evidence (pp. 41–55). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons. Wells, G. L., & Olsen, E. A. (2003). Eyewitness testimony. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 277–295. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145028 Wells, G. L., & Windschitl, P. D. (1999). Stimulus sampling and social psychological experimentation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1115–1125. Wilcock, R., Bull, R., & Milne, R. (2008). Criminal identification by witnesses: Psychology and practice. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Wilcock, R. A., Bull, R., & Vrij, A. (2005). Aiding the performance of older eyewitnesses: Enhanced non-biased line-up instructions and line-up presentation. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 12, 129–140. Wright,  A. M., & Holliday, R. E. (2005). Police officers’ perceptions of older eyewitnesses. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 10, 211–223. doi:10.1348/135532505X37001 Wright, D. B., & Stroud, J. N. (2002). Age differences in lineup identification accuracy: People are better with their own age. Law and Human Behavior, 26, 641–654. Yarmey, A.D. (1979). The psychology of eyewitness testimony. New York, NY: Free Press. Yarmey, A.D. (1996). The elderly witness. In S. Sporer, R. Malpass, & G. Köhnken (Eds.), Psychological issues in eyewitness identification (pp. 259–278). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Yarmey, A. D. (2001). The older eyewitness. In M. B. Rothman, B. D. Dunlop, & P. Entzel (Eds.), Elders, crime, and the criminal justice system (pp. 127–147). New York, NY: Springer.

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 Misinformation Effect in Older Versus Younger Adults A Meta-Analysis and Review   Lindsey E. Wylie1, Lawrence Patihis1, Leslie L.   McCuller, Deborah Davis, Eve M. Brank,   Elizabeth F. Loftus, and Brian H. Bornstein

Introduction The United States is getting older. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, adults over the age of 65 were the fastest growing subpopulation in 2010, and in fact, more people were over the age of 65 than in any previous census (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). These age trends are projected to continue so that by 2050, one in every five persons will be aged 65 or older (Shrestha & Heisler, 2011). This increase in the proportion of older adults is not only happening in the United States; the United Kingdom projects an estimated 23% increase of adults over 65 years of age between 2010 and 2018 (Rutherford, 2012). In Asia, where 55% of the world’s population of older people live, the proportion of the population aged 60 and over is expected to increase from 11% in 2012 to 24% in 2050 (United Nations, 2012). Even lesser developed regions of the world are expecting an aging of their populations with similar trends in both absolute and relative size of the older adult populations (United Nations, 2012). Demographic projections indicate that in the next several decades the world will see an increase in older adults never before experienced. Because older adults will make up a large proportion of the population, we can expect more older adults to become involved in the legal system, often as witnesses to key events (Eglit, 2004). Psycholegal researchers have extensively studied eyewitness memory for events (e.g., Toglia, Read, Ross, & Lindsay, 2006); however, inconsistent findings about age differences between older and younger adults in eyewitness ability make it difficult to form conclusions about how eyewitness age should influence policy and practice, if at all (e.g., Dodson & Krueger, 2006; Loftus, Levidow, & Duensing, 1992). Generally speaking, older adults are perceived as having difficulties with cognition and memory compared with younger adults. Although not always the case, it is well known that memory performance in older adults can decrease with age (Moulin, Thompson, Wright, & Conway, 2007). A research review and quantitative meta-analysis can assist in understanding whether these memory differences are due only to age or whether there are additional methodological factors that are related to how memory is measured that may contribute to these differences. This chapter reviews research examining age differences in

Misinformation Effect 39 memory distortion arising from misleading postevent influences. The goals of this chapter are twofold: (a) to examine age differences between older and younger adults in susceptibility to misinformation, and (b) to identify factors that may moderate age differences between older and younger adults. First, we review previous research that has examined age differences in the misinformation effect. Then, we present the results from a meta-analysis that quantitatively measures overall effects and moderators. Last, we discuss legal implications, methodological issues, and suggestions for future research. What Is the Misinformation Effect? More than 30 years of research have found that when people receive misleading information after an event, it can lead to memory distortion for the original event (e.g., Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978). This phenomenon is now widely referred to as the misinformation effect (Loftus, 2005). Misinformation experiments typically involve three phases. In Phase 1, participants are exposed to a complex event, usually through a video, slides, or photographs. In Phase 2, some time later and unbeknownst to them, participants who are in a misled condition are presented—usually via questions or a narrative description—with some inaccurate information about the event that is intended to mislead them about specific details. In Phase 3, participants’ memory for the original event is tested. Research has demonstrated that the inaccurate information in Phase 2 may become part of the original memory. For example, one of the earliest experiments in this area involved showing a series of slides, including one of a car stopped at a stop sign (see Figure 2.1; from Experiment 2 in Loftus et al., 1978; other participants saw the same car stopped at a yield sign). After a delay, participants were provided with misleading information (e.g., a “yield” sign when they had seen the “stop” sign, or vice versa) surreptitiously embedded within a recall question. Later the participants

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Event

Misinformation

Memory Test

“Did another car pass

“Please indicate

the red Datsun while

which sign you saw:

it was stopped at the

A stop sign

yield sign?”

A yield sign”

Figure 2.1 Basic design of a classic misinformation study (Loftus et al., 1978). These materials were also used in one of the studies in our meta-analysis (Bornstein, Witt, Cherry, & Greene, 2000).

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were asked what they remembered of the original event. The findings revealed that of those who received the misleading information, 57% indicated they saw the “yield” sign (i.e., the misleading item) in the original event. Numerous replications of this methodology demonstrate, in general, that a sizable proportion of participants incorporate the misleading information into their memory for the event detail compared with control groups who do not receive misleading information (see Davis & Loftus, 2007, for a review). Following these early studies using the misinformation paradigm, subsequent research has examined potential moderators of the misinformation effect—including the age of the witness. The Misinformation Effect in Older Adults When older adults are subjected to the misinformation paradigm, most studies have found that they are more susceptible to misinformation than younger adults (e.g., Polczyk et al., 2004; Roediger & Geraci, 2007). However, several studies have not found significant age differences (e.g., Bornstein, Witt, Cherry, & Greene, 2000; Coxon & Valentine, 1997; Dodson & Krueger, 2006; Marche, Jordan, & Owre, 2002) or reverse effects where younger adults are more susceptible to misinformation than older adults (e.g., Marche et al., 2002). In one of the earliest known published studies of the topic, Cohen and Faulkner (1989) had both older (between 62 and 82 years old) and younger (between 25 and 45 years old) participants watch a short video, followed by exposure to either accurate or misleading information. The study found that older adults were not only more susceptible to misinformation, but they also were more confident that their flawed memory was correct. Age differences for the misinformation effect also have been demonstrated in more ecologically valid field settings such as during massage therapy (Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2004) and a museum visit (Loftus et al., 1992). General Memory Deficiencies and Source Monitoring To understand whether older adults’ greater susceptibility to misinformation is merely the result of general memory deficiencies (due to encoding or retrieval), many studies have measured both general memory for nonmisleading details and memory for misleading details. These studies, however, have yielded mixed findings. Some studies have found that older adults performed more poorly on general memory tasks than younger adults, suggesting that deficiencies in general memory ability may contribute to age differences in the misinformation effect (e.g., Karpel, Hoyer, & Toglia, 2001; Schacter, Koustaal, Johnson, Gross, & Angell, 1997; Searcy, Bartlett, & Memon, 2000), whereas other studies have found that older adults performed as well as younger adults on remembering the events they witnessed but were more likely to be influenced by misinformation (e.g., Cohen & Faulkner, 1989; Loftus et al., 1992).

Misinformation Effect 41 General memory differences also depend upon to the type of memory that is being tested. For instance, older adults perform more poorly on memory tasks that require self-initiated effort and spontaneous use of retrieval strategies, but they perform better when the task is less demanding and they are provided retrieval cues (e.g., see Bornstein, 1995; Craik, 1977). Within eyewitness research, this is demonstrated by age differences when memory is tested as free recall questions (i.e., open-ended question on memory for detail) or facial recognition (i.e., lineups). Research reviews have indicated that even though older adults seem to freely recall fewer correct details than younger adults, there are fewer age differences for recognizing event details or crime perpetrators (Bornstein, 1995; Moulin et al., 2007). Perhaps retrieval cues assist older adults with problems in source monitoring, which has been the primary explanation for age differences in previous misinformation studies (e.g., Karpel et al., 2001; Mueller-Johnson & Ceci, 2004), because the cues provide older adults with the contextual information necessary to retrieve accurate memories. Source monitoring refers to judgments about the source of the information rather than the content of the information (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993); thus, older adults may be less able to discern whether information was encoded during Phase 1 (original information) or Phase 2 (misleading information). Misinformation research has found that when asked to remember whether the source of the information was from the original presentation or subsequent presentations of information, older adults had decreased false responding compared with older adults who were just asked to recognize the information as true in a yes–no recognition task (Multhaup, de Leonardis, & Johnson, 1999; Roediger & Geraci, 2007). When comparing whether these effects hold true for younger adults who have lower rates of false responding, it appears that prompting younger adults to identify the source of the information does not change false responding (Roediger & Geraci, 2007). Source monitoring, like that demanded by the misinformation effect paradigm, is a cognitively demanding task and one that older adults do better at when asked to consider the source more carefully. Participant Age The age of the sample in misinformation effect studies also may influence acceptance of misinformation because definitions of older adult and younger adult vary across studies (Brank, 2007). Mostly, studies have examined older adults as a single homogeneous sample, even though deficiencies in memory may differ within older adult subgroups. In addition, most studies have utilized college students as their younger sample, but a few studies have included samples that include people approaching middle age (Cohen & Faulkner, 1989; Loftus et al., 1992; Ross, Spencer, Blatz, & Restorick, 2008). In an ecologically valid setting, Loftus et al. (1992) had museumgoers watch a video of a political rally and provided a postevent text narrative containing misinformation. Those under age 10 and those over age 65 were the most susceptible to

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Lindsey E. Wylie et al. Table 2.1 Percentage of Subjects Giving Misinformation Answer Age group

Control

Misinformed

5–10 11–12 13–15 16–18 19–25 26–35 36–50 51–65 Over 65

18.9 (37) 48.7 (39) 26.1 (46) 36.8 (76) 20.9 (254) 19.3 (264) 29.7 (199) 60.9 (23) 38.5 (52)

37.8 (45) 29.6 (44) 22.9 (48) 25.9 (58) 35.0 (302) 30.1 (302) 22.5 (182) 21.7 (23) 70.0 (30)

Note. Figures in parentheses denote the number of participants in that cell. Reproduced with permission from Loftus et al. (1992)

misinformation, but between the ages of 11 and 65, susceptibility to misinformation seemed to plateau (see Table 2.1). Wylie, Brank, and Bornstein (2012) examined different age groups of older adults (under age 75 and age 75 and older; they also treated age as a continuous variable). The “old-older” adults were more susceptible to misinformation than the “young-older” adults, and the “young-older” adults’ acceptance of misleading information was not any different from that of college students. This study suggests a general pattern whereby having an older sample of older adults may contribute to greater susceptibility; however, additional studies are required that consider this pattern as well as how the age of the younger adult sample may affect findings. Methodological Differences Studies that have examined age differences in the misinformation effect have employed a variety of methods. For example, some studies have presented the original event stimulus (Phase 1) as a video (e.g., Schachter et al., 1997), slides (e.g., Karpel et al., 2001), or word pairs (e.g., Jacoby, Bishara, Hessels, & Toth, 2005). Similarly, studies have presented the misleading information (Phase 2) as text in questions (Dodson & Krueger, 2006), text in narratives (e.g., Roediger & Geraci, 2007), or photographs (e.g., Rémy, Taconnat, & Isingrini, 2008). Acceptance of misinformation (Phase 3) also has been tested in a variety of methods. Studies have tested memory using both recognition (e.g., Mitchell, Johnson, & Mather, 2003) and recall (e.g., Saunders & Jess, 2010). Finally, studies also have varied the time between the presentation of the event and the misinformation, such that the difference was sometimes immediate (e.g., Mitchell et al., 2003) or a matter of weeks (Schacter et al., 1997). This variety highlights both the diversity in methods for examining the misinformation effect and the need for a meta-analysis to provide insight into possible factors that might moderate and explain age differences in misinformation susceptibility.

Misinformation Effect 43

Meta-Analysis Although a review of the literature is informative with respect to the moderating effects of variables for individual studies, meta-analytic procedures provide an aggregate analysis of the overall effects across studies with different methods. Furthermore, given inconsistent findings from studies that have examined age differences for the misinformation effect, a meta-analysis is valuable for determining whether there is an overall effect (and the magnitude of such an effect) when comparing older and younger adult samples as well as to investigate possible moderators. Method Locating Studies An online search was conducted using the following databases: PsycINFO, PubMed, Social Science Citation Index (Social SciSearch), and Education Resources Information Center (ERIC). The keywords included were older with eyewitness, elderly with eyewitness, aging with eyewitness, age difference with eyewitness, older with false memory, elderly with false memory, aging with false memory, age difference with false memory, older with misinformation, elderly with misinformation, aging with misinformation, and age difference with misinformation. Given a possible publication bias for studies with statistically significant findings, attempts were made to collect unpublished data. E-mails requesting unpublished studies were sent to a psychology and law LISTSERV and to researchers who have published in the area of the misinformation effect and/or aging and eyewitness memory. In addition, a complete search was conducted of references cited in articles and book chapters already obtained. Selection Criteria Studies were included that compared younger adults with older adults and were excluded when comparison groups included only children. As noted, definitions of when a person becomes an “older adult” can be quite fluid and differ depending on the source (Brank, 2007). The lowest mean age reported among the older groups within the located studies was 64 years old; the highest mean age was 81 years old. Younger adults’ groups had mean ages ranging from 17 to 35 years old. If the study included a young adult sample, an older adult sample, and a child sample, we coded only the comparisons made between the younger and older adults and excluded comparisons that involved children (e.g., Coxon & Valentine, 1997). In addition, we did not include studies with a single sample that examined only young adults or only older adults (e.g., Chan, Thomas, & Bulevich, 2009). Other exclusion criteria included studies that compared older adults who had Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of brain damage affecting memory. Furthermore, we did not

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include studies that involved only memory recall without first providing misleading information, such as studies examining false recognition using methodology like the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) because this paradigm involves false memories created by word associations but does not involve the introduction of misleading information directly. Because each effect size should be derived from an independent sample, studies also were checked for independence and included only if the participant data were original and not republished. Sample The final sample consisted of 39 independent effect sizes examining the misinformation effect with a total of 3,534 participants (older adults = 1,415; young adults = 2,119). The final sample included 19 published articles, one published book chapter, and three unpublished dissertations or theses. Study publication dates (or filing dates for dissertations and theses) ranged from 1989 to August 2012. Most of the studies included college students for the young adult sample; however, three studies included community samples for the young adult sample: Cohen and Faulkner (1989), with Mage = 35 years old; Loftus et al. (1992), with ages ranging from 19 to 35; and Ross et al. (2008), with Mage = 33 years old. The older adult participants in all the studies were community dwellers. Coded Variables Three authors (LEW, LP, LLM) of the current chapter participated in coding such that each study was independently coded twice to ensure accuracy. We coded several variables thought to be related to either individual sample differences or methodological differences. Any discrepancies were discussed and modified based on consensus of the coders. The variables of interest were age of the older adult sample, the presence of a crime in the stimulus, how the initial event was presented, the method for misinforming participants, the amount of time between the initial stimulus and the misinformation provided, the amount of time between the misinformation and the memory test, whether the induction of misinformation was a within- or between-groups variable, and acceptance of misinformation (the dependent measure in each study, generally reported as means or proportion of participants who were misled). We also coded for publication-related variables such as whether the study was published and year of publication. Analysis of Effect Sizes According to the procedures outlined by Lipsey and Wilson (2001), standardized effect sizes were calculated for the mean differences between older and younger adults for each study’s dependent variable.2 For studies where all

Misinformation Effect 45 groups received misinformation (i.e., no control group), we compared mean differences for older and younger adults. For studies that were between groups on the misinformation variable (i.e., compared a control condition to a misled condition), we compared mean differences for older adults and younger adults in only the misled condition so that effect sizes would be comparable to the within-groups studies. If there were data for more than one age group that fell within our defined age parameters, (Loftus et al., 1992; Wylie et al., 2012), the data were merged and a single effect size was computed. Effect sizes were calculated as product–moment correlation coefficient r values and then transformed using Fisher’s Zr transform (Hedges & Olkin, 1985; Lipsey & Wilson, 2001) because of problematic standard error formation associated with product-moment correlation coefficients (e.g., Rosenthal, 1994). All analyses then were converted back to the more familiar units of r and are presented in the text as weighted mean effect sizes (rm). Finally, for all studies that reported null effects, an effect size of 0 was employed (Rosenthal, 1995). By convention, when two groups are contrasted, a positive sign is assigned to effect sizes in the hypothesized direction (i.e., older adults are more susceptible), and a negative sign is assigned to effect sizes that are not in the hypothesized direction (i.e., older adults are less susceptible). Because studies have different sample sizes and effect sizes derived from sample statistics, each effect size was weighted using the inverse sampling error variance so that studies with larger samples would be given more weight than studies with smaller samples. A fail-safe N (Nfs) was calculated in order to determine the number of studies with averaged null effects that would need to be retrieved to bring the p-value above a specific level of significance (α = .05). This allows estimates of the resistance to the “file drawer threat” (Rosenthal, 1995). Homogeneity analysis revealed that the sample was not homogeneous at a greater probability than chance from sampling error (Q = 557.61, df = 38, p < .001); thus a mixed random effects model for testing moderators was used (Lipsey & Wilson, 2001). All effect size analyses and tests for homogeneity were conducted using Wilson’s (2010) meta-analysis macros for SPSS. Results Our first goal was to test the overall hypothesis that older adults are more susceptible to misinformation than younger adults. Of the 39 independent effect sizes, 31 showed effect sizes in the predicted direction (i.e., older adults are more susceptible to misinformation than younger adults); eight studies showed either the opposite effect or a null effect. Meta-analytic results revealed that older adults were more susceptible to misinformation. The computed random-effects weighted mean effect size was rm = .35, 95% confidence interval (CI) [.22, .47], Z = 4.94, p < .001; Nfs = 22, which suggests a medium effect size (Lipsey & Wilson, 2001) in favor of the hypothesis that older adults are more susceptible to misinformation than younger adults. The

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Nfs calculation indicated that 22 studies with null results would be needed to reverse these findings. Table 2.2 contains a summary of the studies included with their effect sizes and effect size standard errors, and Figure 2.2 shows the results graphically. Table 2.2 Study Characteristics for All Studies in the Meta-Analysis—in Chronological Order First authora

Year

N

Older adult Younger adult Effect SE mean age mean age size Zr

Adams-Price Cohen Loftus Coxon Schacter (shown once) Schacter (shown thrice) Schacter (shown once) Searcy (Elvis) Searcy (chipped-tooth) Bornstein Karpel Marche (shown once) Marche (shown repeatedly) Mitchell Gabbert (confederate) Gabbert (narrative) Mueller-Johnson Polczyk Dodson Roediger (yes–no test) Roediger (source test) Bulevich (E1) Ross (collaborative) Ross (nominal) Rémy(full-attention) Rémy(demanding task) Saunders (contradictory) Saunders (memorable) Holliday (cognitive interv.) Holliday (structured interv.) Bulevich (E1: cued recall) Bulevich (E1: recognition) Bulevich (E2: cued/standard) Bulevich (E2: cued/support)

1989 1989 1992 1997 1997 1997 1997 2000 2000 2001 2001 2002 2002 2003 2004 2004 2004 2004 2006 2007 2007 2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2010 2010 2011 2011 2012 2012 2012 2012

120 64 631 95 32 32 32 78 78 80 122 46 45 102 105 105 113 109 72 23 25 30 33 31 30 30 80 80 30 29 36 60 26 27

b

b

70

35

b

b

70 68 68 68 69 69 69 73 71 71 76 69 69 76 64 68 75 75 76 74 74 70 71 70 72 66 66 74 74 73 73

17 18 18 19 24 24 20 19 24 24 20 21 21 20 22 19 19 19 19 33 33 26 28 22 21 22 22 20 20 20 20

−0.06 0.29 0.96 0.00 0.12 0.33 0.37 0.46 0.04 0.00 0.20 −0.69 0.23 0.46 −0.32 −0.17 0.45 0.27 0.32 1.62 0.55 0.21 0.81 0.89 0.76 1.08 0.18 0.41 −0.21 0.37 0.74 0.51 0.52 0.32

.09 .13 .04 .10 .19 .19 .19 .12 .12 .11 .09 .15 .15 .10 .10 .10 .10 .10 .12 .22 .21 .19 .18 .19 .19 .19 .11 .11 .19 .19 .17 .13 .21 .21

(Continued)

Table 2.2 (Continued) First authora

Year

Bulevich (E2: recg/standard) Bulevich (E2: recg/support) Hess Wylie (nonpatronizing) Wylie (patronizing)

2012 30 73 2012 30 73 2012 192 69 2012 76 74 2012 76 74

N

Older adult Younger adult Effect SE mean age mean age size Zr 20 20 20 21 21

1.05 1.19 −0.03 0.42 0.09

.19 .19 .07 .12 .12

Note. E1 = Experiment 1; interv. = interval; E2 = Experiment 2; recg = recognition. a Condition in parentheses. b Only age ranges were reported

Adams-Price (1989) Cohen & Faulkner (1989) Loftus et al. (1992) Coxon & Valentine (1997) Schacter et al. (shown once-a) (1997) Schacter et al. (shown thrice) (1997) Schacter et al. (shown once-b) (1997) Searcy et al. (Elvis) (2000) Searcy (chipped-tooth) (2000) Bornstein et al. (2001) Karpel et al. (2001) Marche et al. (shown once) (2002) Marche et al. (shown repeatedly) (2002) Mitchell et al. (2003) Gabbert et al. (confederate) (2004) Gabbert et al. (narrative) (2004) Mueller-Johnson et al. (2004) Polczyk et al. (2004) Dodson & Krueger (2006) Roediger & Geraci (yes-no test) (2007) Roediger & Geraci (source test) (2007) Bulevich (E1: dissertation) (2007) Ross et al. (collaborative) (2008) Ross et al. (nominal) (2008) Remy et al. (full-attention) (2008) Remy et al. (demanding task) (2008) Saunders & Jess (contradictory) (2010) Saunders & Jess (memorable) (2010) Holliday et al. (modified cognitive) (2011) Holliday et al. (structured) (2011) Bulevich & Thomas (E1: cued recall) (2012) Bulevich & Thomas (E1: recognition) (2012) Bulevich & Thomas (E2: cued/standard) (2012) Bulevich & Thomas (E2: cued/supportive) (2012) Bulevich & Thomas (E2: recog/standard) (2012) Bulevich & Thomas (E2: recog/supportive) (2012) Hess et al. (2012) Wylie et al. (non-patronizing) (2012) Wylie et al. (patronizing) (2012) Overall (I-squared = 93.2%, p = 0.000)

-2.06

0

2.06

Figure 2.2 Graphical representation of meta-analytic results. Effect size measures represented are in Zr units. The grey boxes surrounding the points represent the weight given to a study, and the error bars are 95% confidence intervals. E1 = Experiment 1; E2 = Experiment 2; recog = recognition.

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Moderator Analyses Our next goal was to identify any moderating variables that might explain the variability among effect sizes. For categorical variables, we used an inverse variance weight mixed random effects model analog to the one-way analysis of variance ANOVA method. For continuous variables, we used a modified random effects regression model estimated in maximum likelihood (see Table 2.3). Sample Variables Mean age of the samples. Our first analysis examined whether the age of the older and younger adult samples moderated the age differences found in misinformation studies using the continuous mean age variable for each sample. Longitudinal studies following healthy aging adults have found an age-related decline in the ability to acquire and retrieve new information (e.g., Small, Stern, Tang, & Mayeux, 1999), and previous eyewitness research has acknowledged theoretical differences between young-older and old-older adults (Brimacombe, Jung, Garrioch, & Allison, 2003). If studies compare young adults with different age groups of older adults, then differences across studies might be due to sample selection and biological aging but not necessarily procedural differences in methodology. Two studies were excluded from this analysis because they did not report the mean ages of their samples and instead reported age ranges (Adams-Price, 1989; Loftus et al., 1992). In a regression that included the mean ages for the older and younger adult samples, the findings revealed that the mean age of the older adults was a significant predictor of effect size variability, B = .06, SE = .02, 95% CI [.02, .10], Z = 3.09, p < .01. The regression weight indicates that as the mean age of the older adult sample increased, so did the effect sizes comparing older and younger adults on susceptibility to misinformation. On the other hand, the mean age of the younger adults was not a significant predictor of effect size, B = .02, SE = .01, 95% CI [−.01, .05], Z = 1.17, p = .24; this is not surprising considering the lack of variability in age for the younger adult samples. It does seem that sample age is an important factor to consider because a substantial proportion of the effect size variability was accounted for by the mean age group predictors (R2 = .22).3 Methodological variables Presence of Crime A previous meta-analysis conducted by Deffenbacher, Bornstein, Penrod, and McGorty (2004; see also Penrod & Bornstein, 2007) suggested that increased stress could negatively affect the accuracy of eyewitnesses and that the presence of a staged crime increases effect sizes for the effects of stress on memory.

Table 2.3 Descriptives and Estimates for Moderator Analysis Moderator

Q

Age

11.02**

Presence of crime

Presentation of the event

Method for misinforming participants

Interval between initial stimulus and test for misinformation

k

Level

B(SE)/rm

37 37

Older adults Younger adults

.06 (.02)** .01 (.01)

28 10

Crime No crime

.46*** .32***

28 9

Video Slides/photographs

.35*** .35*

13 15 5 2 4

Narrative Recall questions Photographs Audio Confederates

.48*** .18 .49* .23 .41†

27 9

No more than 1 hour Between 1 hour and 24 hours Greater than 24 hours

.38*** .35**

4 11 24

Free recall Forced/Multiple choice Recognition

.42** .14 .41***

25 14

Within groups Between groups

.46*** .14

18 21

1989–2005 2006–present

.16 .55***

35 4

Published Unpublished

.39*** .16

0.87

0.01

4.19

1.96

3 Test type

Design for misinformation variable

Publication date

Publication status

.01

3.93

5.21*

6.34*

0.09

Note. Age is the only variable that was continuous; thus B and SE (in parentheses) are reported instead of rm. †p < .10. *p < .05. ** p < .01. ***p < .001.

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Furthermore, the meta-analysis results revealed the effects of stress on accuracy were moderated by age (children vs. adults). On the basis of these findings, we coded each study according to the content of the initial stimulus presented. Studies were coded as either crime (e.g., stealing a purse, robbery, murder; n = 28) or no crime (e.g., listening to a short story; n = 10). There was no moderating effect for presence of a crime on acceptance of misinformation, Q(1) = 0.87, p = .35. Although not a significant predictor for the variability in effect sizes, both stimulus types produced effect sizes that were significantly different from zero. The effect size was somewhat larger for noncrime stimuli, rm = .46, 95% CI [.20, .66], Z = 3.31, p < .001, than for the crime stimuli, rm = .32, 95% CI [.16, .47], Z = 3.77, p < .001. This pattern (albeit not significantly contributing to differences across studies) suggests that age differences may be more pronounced when the stimulus does not elicit stress. Future research should explore age differences within the eyewitness stress paradigm. Presentation of the Event Studies differed in the way they presented the initial event about which participants would later be misled. The studies were coded as either video (n = 28) or slides/photographs (n = 9). One study used an audio narrative and another study used a live event, but because only one study had each of these kinds of stimuli, they were dropped from the analysis. The manner in which the initial event was presented was a variable of interest due to differences in processing goal-directed stimuli (e.g., visually searching a still slide) versus stimulusdriven stimuli (e.g., a moving object’s involuntarily drawing visual attention in a video) as well as basic differences in the way visual and auditory stimuli are encoded (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002; Tulving & Thompson, 1973). Moderator analyses demonstrated that the type of stimulus used did not significantly predict differences in study effect sizes, Q(1) = 0.01, p = .98. In examining each method separately, however, both video presentations, rm = .35, 95% CI [.19, .50], Z = 4.07, p < .001, and slide/photographs, rm = .35, 95% CI [.06, .59], Z = 2.31, p = .02, showed significant effect sizes. The Method for Misinforming Participants Campbell, Edwards, Horswill, and Helman (2007) have suggested that the modality of the presentation of the misinformation might influence test performance due to encoding specificity. Most studies embedded the misleading information into recall questions (n = 15), followed by narratives (n = 13), photographs (n = 5), a confederate (n = 4), and audio (n = 2). One study misled participants with photographs containing misleading items, but this was dropped from analysis because of the small sample size. Moderator analyses demonstrated that how participants were misled did not significantly predict differences in study effect sizes, Q(1) = 4.19, p = .38. Of these approaches, two methods demonstrated significant effect sizes, including photographs, rm = .49, 95% CI [.09, .75], Z = 2.38, p than 60 years) and younger adults (18–24 years), Naveh-Benjamin and colleagues (Bender, Naveh-Benjamin, & Raz, 2010; Naveh-Benjamin, 2000; Naveh-Benjamin et al., 2007; Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008) have demonstrated that older adults tend to have better memory for individual items compared with memory of associated or contextual features. Support for this associative deficit hypothesis has been established by comparing older and younger adults in their ability to recognize cue-target word pairs as well as face–name pairings. Typically, in these studies researchers present older and younger participants with cue-target word pairs for study. At test, item memory and associative memory is assessed using a recognition test. In an associative recognition test, pairs previously studied are re-presented as intact pairs. In addition, recombined pairs are presented as lures. Recombined pairs consist of cues and targets originally presented during initial study as part of other combinations. Using this paradigm, Naveh-Benjamin and colleagues have demonstrated that older adults store individual items similarly to younger adults, as measured by performance on an item memory recognition test; however older adults have shown a deficit in memory for associative information. Research suggests that the binding deficit demonstrated by an associative recognition test may be due to the engagement of simple, less effortful retrieval processes. We elaborate on this point in the next section of this chapter.

Bridging the Gap: Shallow Encoding and Simple Retrieval A broad examination of findings used to support both domain-specific and domain-general theories of cognitive aging suggests that older adults may present deficits in both encoding and retrieval. Take, for example, the speed of processing account. According to this proposal, age-related deficits in memory arise because relevant cognitive operations are executed too slowly to be successfully completed. Let us return to the earlier example of the older adult witness to an automobile accident. The older witness’ attention may be drawn by the sound of the crash. Processing and locating the sound occurs in discrete steps. The time it may take for an older adult to initiate and complete these stage-early cognitive processes leaves less time for stage-later processing. The result is an unreliable witness.

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Shallow processing or limitations in encoding also may be linked to domainspecific accounts for age-related deficits in memory. First, older adults have difficulties initiating effective encoding “strategies” that could promote memory for the associative details of an experience. Craik and Byrd (1982) suggested that older adults may be deficient in the ability to engage in what they called “self-initiated processing.” According to this view, these deficits reduce the kinds of self-initiated activities that are required for efficient task completion at encoding. Thus, older adults may have more difficulty generating elaborate and distinctive memory traces (encoding deficit). In addition, if older adults do not devote significant cognitive resources to search at retrieval, even an elaborate memory trace will fail to be retrieved. If effective processes are not engaged at either encoding or retrieval, memory accuracy will likely be impaired. We take the perspective that older adults are more likely to rely on less effortful processes at both of these crucial stages of memory. In the context of eyewitness memory, less effortful processes engaged at encoding may result in shallower representations and/or binding deficits. The engagement in less effortful processes may be a result of broader domain-general common causes. In this context, a memory for an event may be irretrievable because the memory was not elaborately encoded. Reliance on less effortful retrieval processes may also result from domain-general mechanisms. For example, if older adults are required to attend to sensorimotor processing, they may rely on less effortful processes of familiarity to guide retrieval. Importantly, in the context of eyewitness memory, retrieval processes can be supported to improve retrieval accuracy. The following sections of this chapter examine common age-related eyewitness memory deficits in the context of general encoding and retrieval deficits. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how retrieval support can be effectively implemented.

How Encoding and Retrieval Deficits Affect the Elderly Witness It is difficult to tease apart the contributions of encoding and retrieval failures to age-related deficits in overall eyewitness memory. In general, research has demonstrated that older adults may not encode or sufficiently integrate episodic information to the same extent as younger adults. These deficits in encoding can stem from both domain-specific and domain-general changes in cognitive ability. In addition, older adults have demonstrated deficits in retrieval, utilizing less effortful retrieval processes. In the context of the laboratory, researchers have demonstrated that deficits at both encoding and retrieval affect older adult eyewitness identification and eyewitness event memory. The goal of the next section of this chapter is to examine empirical findings of age-related deficits in identity and event memory, and relate those deficits to both domain-general and domain-specific accounts of cognitive aging. The section is by no means meant to be a comprehensive review of age-deficits in eyewitness memory. Rather, we have opted to select several important findings to illustrate the possible underlying cognitive mechanism.

Uniting Theory to Empirical Evidence 319 Eyewitness Identification In general, eyewitness identification research is conducted within two basic paradigms. The first is one in which participants view a crime and are then asked to identify the perpetrator from a line-up, where either the target is present or the target is absent (TA). The second is a basic face-identification paradigm in which participants view faces and then during a later test phase must decide whether a series of faces were previously presented (for review of eyewitness research methods, see Wells & Penrod, 2011). In line-up identification tasks, and face-recognition tasks in general, the crucial decision older adults must make is whether or not a face had been previously encountered. Then, they must determine based on the recollection of contextual information where they encountered the face. A reduction in contextual recollection, coupled with source monitoring deficits, may render older adults more likely to rely on familiarity and confuse easily accessible information (e.g., a face that looks like one they have seen before) with actual memories (Chapter 3, by Bartlett, in this volume; Jacoby & Rhodes, 2006). These kinds of processes may account for findings that older adults are more likely to erroneously identify a foil as a target in a TA lineup compared with younger adults (Memon & Gabbert, 2003; Rose, Bull, & Vrij, 2005; Wilcock & Bull, 2010; Wilcock, Bull, & Vrij, 2005). For example, Havard and Memon (2009) found that older adults made more false identifications and fewer correct identification in the context of a TA lineup procedure. Similarly, Memon and Gabbert (2003) found that older adults, ages 60 to 80, were significantly more likely to misidentify a target than younger adults, ages 18 to 30. Indeed, in the context of TA lineup procedures, older adults consistently make more false identifications than younger adults (Davis & Loftus, 2012). Further, instructions that reveal that a target may or may not be present do improve younger adult performance by reducing false identifications (Malpass & Devine, 1981) but have little effect on older adult performance (Rose et al., 2005; Wilcock et al., 2005). Researchers have proposed that older adults may be more prone to false identifications when presented with TA lineups because decisions may be based on less effortful retrieval processes such as ease of processing or familiarity. In attempts to support retrieval processes in TA lineups, researchers have provided instructions to older and younger adults that clearly indicate that targets may or may not be present in lineups. However, even under these conditions, older adults were found to be more likely to misidentify a target. In addition, younger adults had better memory for task instructions compared with older adults (Rose et al., 2005). These results suggest that retrieval support failed because the instructions were not effectively calibrated to older adult ability. If one is unable to remember an effective memory strategy, then of course that strategy cannot be applied to a memory task. Wilcock et al. (2005) provided younger and older adults with detailed task instructions that not only emphasized the possibility of the target’s absence from the lineup but also suggested that an incorrect identification could have dire

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consequences. Wilcock et al. found that giving older adults enhanced line-up instructions did improve memory for the instructions as measured by a retrospective memory report at the end of the study; however there was no effect on performance on the line-up task. Thus, this form of task instruction does not seem to be the best way to aid older adults in more accurately identifying targets in a line-up. The finding that information regarding the possible absence of the target from a lineup does not improve older adult performance in these tasks suggests that older adults may have failed to sufficiently encode the target. Therefore, their choice at retrieval may be inappropriately influenced by familiarity processes (Edmonds, Glisky, Bartlett, & Rapcsak, 2012), or a reliance on a gist-like representation to guide identification (Brainerd & Reyna, 2004, 2005; Koutstaal & Schacter, 1997). Importantly, shallow encoding will have downstream effects on the type of recollective processes engaged at retrieval. Certain domain-general theories of cognitive aging effectively account for shallower encoding. In a situation where participants are presented with images to study, attention is likely directed to each image at encoding. However, shallow encoding may arise because of failures to inhibit irrelevant information. Certain domain-specific theories also effectively account for this kind of encoding deficit. Specifically, older participants may not engage effective cognitive processes that facilitate the establishment of more detailed individuated representations of studied faces. This domain-specific deficit in self-initiated processes (Craik, Byrd, & Swanson, 1987; Craik & Byrd, 1982) could be a result of a domain-general deficit in inhibition. It may seem obvious that having access to a detailed and individuated representation of a target should enhance target identification. However, younger adults are also prone to false identification errors in TA lineups. Providing instructions that a target may be absent from a lineup has been shown to improve younger adult identification accuracy. These results suggest that younger adults may feel pressure to choose a target from the lineup. Social pressure may be reduced by TA information. However, older adults are less affected by this kind of information. Although we have examined this age deficit in the context of shallow encoding, it is possible that older adults may fail to appreciate the value of this kind of information. Social and/or motivational pressure may continue to influence older adult selection. For example, older adults may be motivated to demonstrate good memory ability and in so doing, may feel that a failure to identify a target will be viewed as a memory failure. Research examining the influence of social pressure on memory in older adults is limited. However, social pressure effects have been demonstrated in college-age participants (Reysen, 2003; Schneider & Watkins, 1996) as well as children (Pozzulo & Dempsey, 2006). Interestingly, some studies show that when a target is present in a line-up, older adult witnesses are just as accurate as young adult witnesses in identifying the correct target (Memon, Bartlett, Rose, & Gray, 2003; Memon & Gabbert, 2003; Yarmey & Kent, 1980). Under these conditions, the reliance on less effortful processes at retrieval to guide recollection can result in success because previously

Uniting Theory to Empirical Evidence 321 viewed targets should feel more familiar than lures. However, it can still lead to source-monitoring errors such as those described earlier in this chapter. Event Memory: Susceptibility to Misinformation Age-related misinformation susceptibility is thoroughly reviewed in other chapters in this volume; however, as with identity memory, we are able to reexamine age-related misinformation susceptibility in the context of theories of cognitive aging. In a standard misinformation experiment, participants witness an event and after some delay are exposed to misleading postevent information. Misinformation can be presented in the context of a narrative of the original event or embedded in leading questions. After misinformation presentation, memory for the original event is assessed. In several studies older adults showed poorer performance for the control items and increased susceptibility to the postevent misleading information compared with younger adults (Cohen & Faulkner, 1989; Coxon & Valentine, 1997; Karpel, Hoyer, & Toglia, 2001; Mitchell, Johnson, & Mather, 2003). Further, older adults have been shown to be more confident in their incorrect memories compared with younger adults (for a recent example, see Bulevich & Thomas, 2012). As with eyewitness identification, shallow encoding will affect event memory. Older adults may be more susceptible to misinformation because they fail to sufficiently encode the original event. Alternatively, older adults may show less susceptibility to misinformation, though poorer event memory overall, because they fail to sufficiently encode both the original event and the misleading narrative. The root causes for shallow encoding have been previously discussed and should be considered when assessing the testimony of an elderly witness; however, encoding deficits alone do not account for the age-related deficits demonstrated in the misinformation paradigm. The direction of recent misinformation research has been to explore situations that exacerbate misinformation susceptibility, develop techniques to minimize susceptibility, and understand the cognitive mechanisms that underlie susceptibility. For example, the characteristics and the delivery of the misinformation have recently been explored. In one study, researchers demonstrated that younger and older adults’ misinformation susceptibility was greater if provided in the context of a conversation about the original event as opposed to a narrative that recapitulated the original event (Gabbert, Memon, Allan, & Wright, 2004). Similarly, within the context of a social contagion experiment, Meade and Roediger (2009) found that younger adults tended to incorporate incorrect information about a complex scene if those details were discussed collaboratively. This finding is consistent with the social pressure research previously discussed. In more recent work, Davis and Meade (2013) compared older (ages 65–85) and younger (ages 18–35) adult participants in this task. Older and younger adults incorporated erroneous information into their final test when the confederate was a younger adult but discounted that information when the confederate was an older adult.

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These results suggest that older adults may encode misleading details, and errors may emerge in event memory because of conscious evaluation processes at retrieval. Failures in conscious evaluative processes may be ameliorated by changing the nature of the test to one that encourages conscious evaluation. In the context of misinformation experiments, participants are exposed to potentially conflicting details associated with an original event. Importantly, these details come from two separate sources. Effective retrieval monitoring would facilitate accurate discrimination between original event details and details associated with the postevent narrative. One common tool used to examine retrieval monitoring is a source-monitoring test (cf. Johnson et al., 1993). In a sourcemonitoring test, participants are directly instructed to evaluate the source of a specific memory. Typically, this is done on an item-by-item level. Thus, for every question, participants are required to attribute a source (original event or postevent narrative). The general finding from the misinformation literature is that source-monitoring tests reduced susceptibility to misleading information in younger adults (Lindsay et al., 1991). Source-monitoring tests have also been used with older adults, yielding better overall memory accuracy than standard yes–no recognition tests (Multhaup, de Leonardis, & Johnson, 1999). However, the benefit of a source-monitoring test has not been consistently demonstrated. For example, Mitchell et al. (2003) found that older adults (mean age of 76) attributed a greater proportion of misleading items to the original event compared with younger adults (mean age of 19.6), even under conditions where the source requirement was made explicit. These data would suggest that younger adults may be more likely to integrate a specific detail with the context in which it was encoded, whereas the established binding deficit in older adults also impacts performance in misinformation paradigms. That is, older adults may access details from both the original event and postevent narrative but are less likely to bind details and context and thus more prone to source misattribution errors. That being said, additional support at retrieval has been shown to improve older adult performance in the misinformation paradigm. As one example, researchers using a Modified Cognitive Interview with older adults have demonstrated a reduction in misinformation susceptibility (Holliday et al., 2012). The original Cognitive Interview (Geiselman, 1984; Geiselman, Fisher, MacKinnon, & Holland, 1987) was developed to improve eyewitness testimony of adults by capitalizing on principles of encoding specificity (Tulving & Thomson, 1973) and varied retrieval (Tulving, 1974). In the context of the Cognitive Interview, the assumption is that if event information has been sufficiently encoded, access to that information may be facilitated by reinstating the context of encoding at retrieval. Thus, the Cognitive Interview encourages the interviewee to mentally reconstruct physical and personal contexts surrounding the event to be recalled and to report all details. Varied retrieval is facilitated by encouraging participants to change perspective and by changing the order of retrieval. Holliday et al. (2012) showed that a Modified Cognitive Interview, using a shorter interview protocol, improved both older and younger adult memory

Uniting Theory to Empirical Evidence 323 in the context of a misinformation experiment. Although this improvement in memory for both age groups was observed, the results must be interpreted cautiously because younger adults did not demonstrate a misinformation effect regardless of testing method. The Modified Cognitive Interview may improve older adult recollection because it encourages more effective retrieval strategies and efficient retrieval monitoring that might not be spontaneously engaged in otherwise. With this kind of external support at retrieval, older adults may be less likely to rely on gist or familiarity-based retrieval processes. Rather, they may search for specific individuating and source-specifying information to substantiate retrieved information. Bulevich and Thomas (2012) have also demonstrated that older adults can improve performance in misinformation experiments if directed to engage in elaborated recollection processes. Researchers generally agree that retrieval demands differ between recognition and recall tests, with recall placing larger retrieval demands on participants (Roediger & Guynn, 1996). Bulevich and Thomas found that older adults demonstrated a significantly smaller misinformation effect when given a cued recall test compared with a recognition test. Further, they found that when given explicit instructions at retrieval to inspect the source of retrieved details, older adults demonstrated reductions in misinformation susceptibility in the context of both cued recall and recognition tests. The first author of this chapter has demonstrated in several studies that older adults can be encouraged to engage more effortful processes at retrieval, thereby reducing memory misattribution errors (Thomas & Bulevich, 2006) distortions in spatial memory (Thomas, Bonura, Taylor, & Brunyé, 2012), and improving overall memory performance (Bulevich & Thomas, 2012) and decision making (Thomas & Millar, 2012). This line of research, in conjunction with findings from Holliday et al. (2012) and findings that older adult memory accuracy can improve when given item-by-item source-monitoring tests (Dodson & Johnson, 1993; Johnson et al., 1993; Koutstaal, Schacter, Galluccio, & Stofer, 1999; Norman & Schacter, 1997; Schacter et al., 1997; Schacter, Norman, & Koutstaal, 1998), suggest that older adults can use more effortful retrieval monitoring processes to improve overall memory and decision making.

The Critical Relationship Between Metacognition and Memory Theoretical models of cognitive aging indicate that there are several important factors that must be evaluated when considering older witness testimony. From the perspective of domain-general models, older adults may have difficulty establishing a robust and detailed memory of an event because of limitations in cognitive capacity and/or speed. From the perspective of domain-specific models, older adults may fail to initiate cognitive processes that sufficiently integrate witnessed event information. Domain-general theories of cognitive aging suggest that deficits in overall memory retention may be difficult to ameliorate if the focus is on encoding. In an eyewitness scenario, older adults

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may not encode as much information as their younger counterparts because of processing speed limitations, sensory deficits, and/or inhibitory deficits. These domain-general factors may impact older adults’ ability to initiate processes that will establish robust, detailed, and integrated memories for an event. Though age-related deficits in encoding may negatively impact the overall quantity of event information that can be reported by older adults, techniques employed at retrieval may serve to improve access to encoded information as well as accuracy in reported information. The examination of certain domain-specific theories allows the authors to posit that retrieval may be improved if older adults are given direction to engage in cognitively effortful processes. For example, in the context of the Modified Cognitive Interview, Holliday et al. (2012) demonstrated that older adults were less likely to attribute misleading details to the originally witnessed event than were older adults who were administered a standard interview. Similarly, Bulevich and Thomas (2012) demonstrated that when given a cued-recall test, older adults accessed fewer details, but the details that were accessed were more accurate than when older participants were given a recognition test. Both of these studies capitalized on retrieval support. In fact, Bulevich and Thomas argued that retrieval effort improved overall memory accuracy because it forced participants to engage in a more conscious and comprehensive search process. Thus, participants were less likely to rely on less effortful processes of familiarity and more likely to retrieve relevant event details. Similar kinds of retrieval support have been shown to be helpful in improving identification memory. For example, Wilcock and Bull (2010) found that incorrect identification in TA lineups could be reduced if older adults were administered a prelineup questionnaire. After witnessing a staged crime, participants were asked three questions that facilitated metamemorial inspection of their memory for the event. Specifically, participants were asked the following: How clear a memory do you have for the face of the criminal? Bearing in mind the criminal may be present in the lineup, how sure are you that you will be able to correctly recognize him, that is, identify him if you see a photograph of him in a lineup? Bearing in mind the criminal may not be present in the lineup, how sure are you that you will be able to correctly reject a lineup, that is, say none of them if the photograph of the criminal isn’t there? Following these questions, participants were instructed that the target may or may not be present in the subsequent lineup. The results were clear. Older participants who received prelineup questions were significantly less likely to incorrectly identify a target in a TA lineup compared with older participants who did not receive the prelineup questions. Instructions to carefully evaluate memory are instructions to engage in metacognitive processes of monitoring one’s memory. Importantly, the research so far discussed examining retrieval support suggests that older adults can improve memory accuracy if given some direction as to how to judge the

Uniting Theory to Empirical Evidence 325 quality of memory. However, it is unclear whether the kinds of instructions employed in these studies facilitated access to useful information or changed the criterion for responding. With a change in response criteria, older adults may be less likely to correctly identify a target but also more likely to correctly reject a lure. Similarly, with a change in criteria, older adults may be less likely to provide incorrect or misleading details about an event but more likely to omit relevant details. In order to assess whether supportive instructions at retrieval affected response criterion as opposed to access to relevant details, Bulevich and Thomas (2012) examined older adult susceptibility to misinformation in the context of the quality-accuracy profile (QAP) developed by Koriat and Goldsmith (1996). Within this context, overall memory retention can be separated from the metacognitive process of monitoring or control. When the QAP procedure is used after original event and misinformation presentation, memory retention, metamemorial monitoring, and metacognitive control are separately assessed using a two-stage testing procedure. In the first phase, overall memory retention was gauged by forcing participants to respond to every question. Forced responses accompanied confidence judgments; therefore, metacognitive monitoring could be determined and compared with memory retention. In a test such as this, metacognitive contributions to responding are minimized. That is, participants are required to answer every question and encouraged to guess if they do not know an answer. The likelihood that participants may withhold answers because of changing response criteria is attenuated. However, participants are also required to provide confidence judgments for each of their answers. In the event of a guess, if metacognitive monitoring is well calibrated, the guess will accompany a low confidence rating. Thus, during the forceretrieval phase of responding, memory retention and metamemorial monitoring could be estimated. Although the monitoring process cannot influence memory output under forced retrieval constraints, accuracy of the monitoring process can be examined. Confidence judgments have been assessed in numerous identity and misinformation studies. The majority of these studies suggest that older adults demonstrate a greater overconfidence bias. For example, in the context of a misinformation experiment, Dodson and Krueger (2006) found that older adults were most confident in retrieved misleading details, whereas younger adults were the least confident in this class of responses. Consistent with these results, Bulevich and Thomas (2012) demonstrated that older adults were more overconfident on misleading trials compared with younger adults. Calibration between confidence and memory performance on the forced-retrieval test for misleading trials is plotted in Figure 13.1. What is clear from this figure is that although both older and younger adults demonstrate overconfidence, the bias is significantly greater in older compared with younger adults. Monitoring of memory should affect control of memory (i.e., Nelson & Narens, 1994). In the context of the previously described experiment, participants were forced to respond to every question. Therefore, participants likely

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Figure 13.1 Calibration curves comparing older and younger participants on misleading trials.

included answers that accompanied low confidence. In naturalistic eyewitness settings, these constraints may not be placed on the witness. That is, the witness should be able to exercise control based on the monitoring process. Ostensibly, the witness can withhold uncertain information. Bulevich and Thomas (2012) demonstrated that monitoring did affect control. Both older (mean age of 73.7) and younger (mean age of 19.8) participants withheld answers when given the opportunity in the second phase of testing. In this phase, participants were re-presented with answers given during forced retrieval and were provided the opportunity to include or withhold answers from final reporting. Although their provided confidence judgments did not accompany their answers, both older and younger participants withheld answers that accompanied low confidence. That is, monitoring directly affected control in both groups of participants. Unfortunately, this resulted in gains in accuracy for younger adults but not for older adults. Because monitoring was significantly impaired in older adults on misleading trials (overconfidence), they did not effectively withhold incorrect answers. Thus, older adults were limited in the ability to improve memory accuracy because ineffective monitoring had direct consequences on control. If metacognitive retrieval monitoring affects control over output of information, then improvements in monitoring accuracy should result in improved control and bolstered memory output accuracy. Techniques and instructions developed to support older adult retrieval may affect the processes that guide memory search. When given instructions as to how to monitor source or to judge confidence, older adults may actively search for cues that can be used to assess the validity of an item in memory. Therefore, supportive instructions should directly influence the cues and attributes used to monitor output at retrieval. As opposed to simply increasing access to event information, supportive instructions may more likely guide older adults through the monitoring

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Figure 13.2 Calibration curves comparing older and younger participants on misleading trials after supportive instructions.

process. In order to test this hypothesis, Bulevich and Thomas (2012) provided older adults with supportive instructions at retrieval. In the context of a misinformation experiment, directly preceding the two-phase testing dictated by the QAP procedure, Bulevich and Thomas instructed participants in how to effectively monitor the source of information. The instructions were given once at the beginning of testing, which required participants to flexibly and strategically apply them throughout testing. The results were striking. When given supportive instructions, metacognitive monitoring of items retrieved on the forced-reporting test dramatically improved. As can be seen in Figure 13.2, neither older nor younger adults demonstrated a pattern of overconfidence on misleading trials. Importantly, a misinformation effect was found even after supportive instructions under the constraints of forced retrieval. That is, when forced to respond to every question, both older and younger participants reported misleading details for some of their answers. These results demonstrate that misleading postevent information is learned; however, with supportive instructions, overconfidence in those details can be mitigated. As such, when given the opportunity to withhold answers in Phase 2 of testing, both older and younger participants made dramatic gains in memory accuracy. In fact, the misinformation effect, as measured by a difference in performance between control and misleading trials, was eliminated in both groups of participants on this freeresponding test.

Conclusions Cognitive decline, particularly in episodic memory, is strongly associated with aging. Several well-supported domain-general and domain-specific theories of cognitive aging have been discussed. Although each theoretical framework

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takes a different position regarding the underlying mechanism affecting agerelated changes in cognition, all agree that cognitive decline will result in how information is initially learned and later retrieved. As it relates to eyewitness memory, understanding the underlying cognitive mechanisms at play can facilitate targeted interventions to support older adult memory. Initial learning, or encoding, can be supported through simple techniques such as note-taking. In situations that are unconstrained by attentional demands, this strategy is effective. Diaries can be kept and pictures can be taken. Both can serve to support encoding and retrieval. However, eyewitness situations are limited by factors such as surprise, stress, anxiety, and fear. These factors place limitations on how information is encoded and will interact with mechanisms proposed to account for age-related cognitive decline. In these situations, the encoding of the event is outside the control of the older witness. Therefore, support of cognitive processes that underlie encoding seems to be a relatively ineffective remedy given these constraints. These encoding factors can be thought of as analogous to Wells’ (1978) estimator variables over which the legal system has no control. The authors of this chapter would argue that support of the retrieval process (analogous to Wells’ system variables), and specifically, those that support metacognitive monitoring, are the most effective avenues of improving the accuracy of the older adult eyewitness. Metacognitive processes employed at retrieval result in conscious monitoring and control of memory output. Metacognitive processes are engendered by retrieval effort and supportive instructions. Instructions can be developed to guide conscious evaluative processing of retrieved information. In this sense, witnesses can be directed into a mode in which they may be forced to weigh phenomenological associates of a memory in a manner that they may not do spontaneously. In a source-monitoring task, where participants are directed to assess whether a memory can be attributed to a witnessed event or a narrative, participants may not only use the ease or fluency with which a detail is retrieved but may also use perceptual cues to distinguish between the sources. When the inspection is consciously employed, participants use a more stringent metamemorial monitoring process to evaluate memories. When monitoring is effective, witnesses are better able to control memory output, thereby omitting inaccurate information without a cost to accurate reporting. Unfortunately, this will not necessarily result in as detailed and elaborate a report. However, in the context of eyewitness reporting, where errors can lead to a loss of freedom, it seems wise to err on the side of accuracy rather than the quantity of information reported.

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14 The Older Witness in Court An International Perspective Graham Davies and Noelle Robertson

In April 2012, a 94-year-old Louisiana woman who had been raped, robbed and repeatedly beaten testified in court against her alleged attacker. In answer to questions from the prosecutor, she said she had been sitting in her bedroom watching television when she noticed a man in her room. At first, she thought it was her nephew who routinely checked on her, but the man approached and started to beat her with his fists. He had pinioned her arms to the chair and torn at her underclothes before indecently assaulting her. She identified the defendant in court as the man who had attacked her, describing him as the ‘new man in town’ to whom she had previously given some work around the house. Under cross-examination, the victim admitted that her room had been in darkness apart from the light from the television. She had failed to pick out the defendant from a photo array administered nearly a month after the attack. She also agreed that she had seen a television news report of the defendant being arrested and read newspaper accounts of the incident prior to viewing the array. After hearing her evidence, a grand jury indicted the defendant to stand trial in September 2012. The victim, who had already suffered a heart attack in the wake of the assault, had her testimony video recorded in the event that she was unavailable to give evidence at trial. The district attorney noted that the assault she had suffered could easily have led to her death and commented ‘We are going to do everything in our power by legal means available to put the defendant in the penitentiary for the rest of his natural life’ (Schmidt, 2012). This vignette illustrates the dilemmas faced by the legal system in dealing with an elderly victim of crime: on the one hand, great sympathy for the vulnerable victim; on the other, concerns as to his or her reliability as a witness, which could lead to a mistaken conviction or mistaken acquittal. Eliciting reliable testimony from elderly1 witnesses and ensuring that it is heard at court can present special problems, which may require variations in the way evidence is taken and heard. In this chapter, we consider the cognitive, social and affective influences on the witness competency of the elderly and the consequent difficulties investigators and prosecutors may face in gathering and presenting their evidence. We also consider some of the varied solutions that have been developed, particularly, but not exclusively, in the United Kingdom, to assist elderly witnesses at court to facilitate their evidence.

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The Elderly Witness at Court: Image and Reality There has been a large increase in recent years in the numbers of older witnesses giving evidence at court, and this, in turn, reflects long-term changes in Western societies. First, the proportion of elderly persons in the population as a whole is on the increase. In 2010 in the United Kingdom, for instance, there were 10 million people aged 65 or over or 1 in 6 of the population, an increase of over a million in a single generation (Parliamentary Business, 2010). Between 1995 and 2008, in economically developed countries as a whole, the proportion of the population aged 65 and over increased by 1.5 times the rate of the total population, a consequence of higher life expectancy and lowered fertility rates (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2012). Second, even in straitened economic times, the elderly can be perceived as vulnerable and affluent, making them disproportionately targets for acquisitive crime such as burglary (Heap, 2008). The National Crime Survey records selfreports of crime from a large sample of members of the public (N = 12,485). The figures for 2010–2011 show that 1.3% of respondents aged over 65 years reported being victims of violence during the previous year, 2.6% reported being burgled, 5.1% had experienced vandalism and 4.2% had had their vehicle stolen or damaged (Home Office, 2011). Although older people are much less likely to be victims of crime than younger persons, these figures are still substantial. Moreover, there are certain types of crime to which the elderly are disproportionately vulnerable. These include abuse and neglect while in care; so-called distraction burglaries (criminals entering their homes under the pretext of tracing a gas leak or checking power meters) and ‘rogue traders’ (itinerant tradesmen who undertake ‘urgent’ home repairs at extortionate rates; Crown Prosecution Service, 2008a). Thus, older adults are increasingly likely to provide court testimony. Like most age and ethnic groups, older adults are subject to stereotyping (Cuddy & Fiske, 2002; Yarmey, 2000), which could impact on how their testimony is perceived. A strongly held set of negative attitudes toward older people may constitute ‘ageism’ (Nelson, 2002). Some aspects of such stereotypic views of seniors may be highly relevant to their anticipated performance at court. Ross, Dunning, Toglia and Ceci (1989) asked college students to rate the likely performance as witnesses of various ages under courtroom examination. A 74-year-old was perceived as likely to be more honest than a 21-year-old but show lower accuracy, heightened suggestibility and be accorded less evidential weight than the younger witness. A later study (Mueller-Johnson, Toglia, Sweeny, & Ceci, 2007) reported that mock jurors with ageist attitudes perceived the transcript of a 79-year-old witness as less accurate and less convincing compared with those with less ageist views. This negative view of older witnesses is not uniformly shared by professionals actually involved in the courts. Certainly, a survey of a sample of police officers in the UK in a study by Wright and Holliday (2005) found that over half thought older witnesses were likely to be less reliable and thorough

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compared with younger witnesses. The officers reported that they lacked confidence in dealing with the emotional distress and memory loss sometimes encountered among the elderly. On the other hand, Yarmey (1984) reported that North American lawyers and police officers held generally positive views of the qualities of elderly witnesses. Older people conceded that their fellow elders would not generally be effective eyewitnesses unless they projected themselves as active and powerful. Another issue is that there are several competing stereotypes about how older adults are expected to perform in the witness box. Whether a negative or positive stereotype is evoked—the confused and vulnerable as opposed to the distinguished community elder—may be triggered by a range of contextual and appearance-related cues (Nunez, McCoy, Clark, & Shaw, 1999). Moreover, any general expectations on competence may be contradicted or confirmed by actual experience of the testimony of specific elderly witnesses (Yarmey, 2000). Brimacombe, Quinton, Nance and Garrioch (1997) found that collegeage students rated the testimony of a 70-year-old witness concerning a staged incident as less credible than that of a 20- or 35-year-old, a finding which might be perceived as reflecting ageist beliefs. However, analysis of the content of the older individual’s testimony confirmed that it was indeed less accurate and complete, so the judgment was veridical. Using a similar design, Ross et al. (1990) noted that their college participants violated stereotype and rated a particular older witness as more accurate and credible than a corresponding 21-year-old. The older witness was in reality a distinguished retired professor from Cornell University (D. F. Ross, personal communication, quoted in Nunez et al., 1999). Although no data were provided on the accuracy of the elder’s account, the higher credibility may have been linked to a belief that the older witness would be more likely to provide an honest account of the scenario employed, which involved drug dealing. The apparent ability of individuals to set aside prejudice and focus on realities in the courtroom is a heartening one from the perspective of social justice. A similar ability of observers to ignore stereotypes in specific judgments has been observed in a series of studies conducted by the first author on perception of speeding by drivers of different marques of motorcar. For instance, participants hold robust, negative views of likely speeding and aggression displayed by drivers of BMWs relative to those who drive more modest vehicles such as the Volkswagen Polo (Davies & Patel, 2005). However, when invited to estimate the actual speed of examples of these two marques, their estimates showed no sign of stereotypical effects (Davies, 2009). This distinction between image and reality might predict that in the courtroom, stereotyping is more likely to occur when judgments are made on the basis solely of a written statement from a witness rather than from their testimony in the witness box. Following Nunez et al. (1999), attorneys examining elderly witnesses might wish to combat any potential negative stereotyping by introducing at an early stage aspects of the witness’s current lifestyle which reflect a continuing active and vigorous approach to life, combined with rich experience (Parker, 2012).

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Elderly Witnesses: Memory Strengths and Vulnerabilities If the stereotypes evoked by elderly witness are inconsistent and a poor guide to how individuals actually judge the testimony of older persons, what is the reality regarding the testimonial competence of older adults? There is ample research evidence to justify the intuitive notion that general memory competence declines in older age (Castel, Humphreys, Lee, Galvan, Balota, & McCabe, 2011; and see Chapter 13, this volume). However, although memory shows broad normative fluctuations in later life, there are wide interindividual variations in the pace of change, with some persons maintaining high levels of mnemonic competence to age 80 and over: the so-called super-aged (Harrison, Weintraub, Mesulam, & Rogalski, 2012), whereas others begin to show mnemonic deterioration from as young as 45 to 49 years (Singh-Manoux et al., 2012). Rates of deterioration are also modulated by individual and environmental factors. These include dietary choices (Witte, Fobker, Gellner, Knecht, & Floel, 2009); amount of regular physical exercise (Lautenschlager et al., 2008); mental health issues, in particular depression (Vinkers, Gussekloo, Stek, Westendorp, & van der Mast, 2004); and previous history of intellectually stimulating activity (Cassels, 2009). Cognitive deterioration is not uniform across all forms of memory. Working memory appears to be most vulnerable, followed by episodic memory, while procedural memory seems least affected (Brickman & Stern, 2009). Links between context and recall appear to suffer disproportionately (Spencer, Wesley, & Raz, 1995), which may justify the defence attorney’s suggestion to the elderly victim described earlier that she might have confused the circumstances in which she had previously seen the accused. By contrast, semantic memory is maintained and will even improve with age (Ober, Shenaut, Jagust, & Stillman, 1991). Moreover, the pace of deterioration in those aspects of memory that are affected by age is not consistent: the normative rate of deterioration appears faster beyond 75 years of age compared with the previous decade (Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000). This may reflect the growing frequency of pathological brain changes, over and above what has been termed ‘benign senescent forgetfulness’ (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2007) or more prosaically ‘senior moments’. A more serious condition than mere periodic forgetfulness is represented by mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which describes a set of behavioural indices of gross memory loss, extensively studied by Petersen and colleagues (e.g. Petersen, 2011). It is marked by symptoms including regular difficulties in finding words, inability to recall names, trouble following the flow of conversation, and difficulties in remembering appointments and in locating personal belongings (‘I put it down somewhere’). Persons with MCI are normally quite capable of looking after themselves and show some awareness of their memory problems, as do family members. This awareness will be reflected in the use of external memory aids, such as annotated diaries and calendars and writing notes to or lists for themselves (Caprani, Greaney, & Porter, 2006). The development of MCI can date from around 50 years of age, and a recent cohort study reported that after age 70, 7.2% of men and 5.7% of women develop MCI every year. The relationship

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between MCI and Alzheimer-type dementia is debated but unresolved. Some research suggests that as few as 10% of those suffering from MCI subsequently go on to develop Alzheimer-type Dementia every year (Bruscoli & Lovestone, 2004), though some studies have reported much higher rates of progression (Ritchie & Ritchie, 2012). Other research, however, supports a more tenuous link between the two conditions and emphasizes that many persons showing MCI symptoms may never develop any more serious cognitive impairments and may even revert to benign forgetfulness (Busse, Angermeyer, & Reidel-Heller, 2006). Dementia represents the most serious disruption of memory, characterized by much more global cognitive impairments combined with a lack of insight into memory difficulties. Dementia can be a product of a variety of cerebral pathologies, of which multi-infarct and Alzheimer’s-type dementia are most common. The inability of persons with advanced dementia to testify about recent events or orient themselves in time and space creates major difficulties in the detection and prosecution of offences committed against them. A recent Care Home scandal in the United Kingdom illustrates the problem. The daughter of an elderly resident with dementia became concerned by repeated bruising on her mother’s body. Her mother was unable to provide any coherent explanation as to how these injuries were caused. The daughter then set up video surveillance in her mother’s bedroom, which revealed that she endured regular assaults by care home staff. Despite her mother being unavailable as a witness, this footage resulted in the prosecution of those involved (Athill, 2012).

Elderly Witnesses: The Impact of Social and Affective Factors In addition to the cognitive factors that are the focus of much witness research with the elderly, social and affective influences also play an important role in determining memory performance in everyday life and the courtroom. Stress has figured as a factor in eyewitness research in younger adults (e.g. Valentine & Mesout, 2009), but its impact appears to have been neglected in the elderly. A review of the wider literature on stress and coping among older adults by Aldwin (2007) concluded that the evidence suggesting that aging reduces resilience to stress is inconclusive, but existing research has suggested adults over 65 years appeared no different in their adverse reactions compared with younger persons. However, studies to date have focused on routine everyday problems, such as the impact of illness or the death of a close friend rather than unusual, discrete stressors of the kind encountered in criminal contexts (Aldwin, Sutton, Chiara, & Spiro, 1996), and more forensically relevant studies are needed. Models of aging and emotions of the kind proposed by Carstensen, Mikels and Mather (2006) propose that the elderly become increasingly attached to routinized activities and prefer to spend time interacting with friends and loved ones in familiar environments rather than seeking out novel and potentially stressful experiences. This might imply a greater reluctance on the part of some elders to accept the unfamiliar environment of the courtroom and the indignities of examination and, particularly, cross-examination.

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Social connectedness appears to be a key mitigating factor in reducing stress and maintaining cognitive performance into old age. Not all elderly persons can rely on a well-integrated social network, and many may live alone. According to Hawkley and Cacioppo (2010), 40% of adults aged over 65 reported being lonely at least some of the time, and this propensity increases with age. Among other negative consequences, Hawkley and Cacioppo’s review linked perceived social isolation with poorer overall cognitive performance, faster cognitive decline, lowered affect and increased sensitivity to social threats. Also, as the Louisiana case cited earlier illustrates, living alone also increases vulnerability to crime. High levels of anxiety can also prevent elderly witnesses from reporting crime or going to court. A review by Bryant, Jackson and Ames (2008) noted there has been surprisingly little research conducted on levels of anxiety in aging populations. Bryant et al. concluded that overall, prevalence of clinically diagnosed anxiety disorder was lower in older compared with younger adults. Absolute rates of such anxiety problems among community samples of elderly people showed large fluctuations, with a range from as low as 2% through to a high of 14%. The highest rates of anxiety symptoms were found in patients with diagnoses of dementia or neurological and cardiovascular conditions. A final factor concerns elders’ own perceptions of the robustness and validity of their memory that may be at variance with its true status. On the witness stand, they may express confidence in an account that is undermined by other evidence, or under questioning, come to doubt memories that are, in fact, veridical. Studies concerning the relationship between subjective and objective memory status among elderly persons have produced equivocal results (e.g. Zelinski, Burnight, & Lane, 2001). Concerns over memory competence are regularly disclosed by elders to their caregivers, and there is some evidence that anxiety concerning memory functioning reflects a broader concern about cognitive competence as presented to others. Pearman and Storandt (2005), for instance, reported that more than 30% of subjective memory complaints by older persons in a community-based sample were linked to self-consciousness and anxiety and that perceptions of memory frailty were in turn associated with a negative self-concept. Negative stereotypes about aging and memory performance are perceived as threatening by older adults, and their memory performance suffers as a consequence, especially for those who value their memory but endorse the stereotypes (Hess & Emery, 2012). Stress, social isolation, levels of anxiety and doubts over memory competence are significant hurdles for witnesses contemplating court appearance. There is a need for any legal system preparing elderly witnesses for court to address at least some of these issues.

Conclusions on Research Relevant to the Elderly Witness This brief overview of the cognitive, affective and social factors influencing memory in the elderly illustrates the sheer diversity and complexity of factors leading to the difficulties encountered by older adults and their consequences

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for their performance in the witness box. Chronological age is a necessary, but imperfect, determinant of likely witness competence. Such impressions may be supplemented by information from family members, caregivers or doctors, and prosecutors should routinely interview the witness themselves to gather a view of his or her likely performance in court. Profiles on psychometric tests such as the Rivermead Behavioral Memory Test (Wilson, Cockburn, Baddeley, & Hierns, 1989), can provide a valuable assessment of general memory competence, but the relationship of performance on such tests to memory for a specific incident could be problematic. For witnesses of any age, memory for a witnessed event can be influenced by a range of modulating factors. Such ‘estimator variables’ (Wells, 1978) include whether a witness is testifying to a single incident or repeated incidents, whether the incident or incidents involved a familiar or unfamiliar person or whether an event occurred recently or in the past. As we have noted, negative stereotypes of the elderly can be powerful and persuasive in witness perception. However, an altogether more positive picture of the elderly emerges from the wider literature on life-span development and aging, which challenges the notion of seniors as an isolated, homogeneous population, psychologically and physiologically vulnerable. For instance, an American Psychological Association (APA) Working Group (APA, 1997) surveyed a range of developmental studies of aging and concluded that the majority of elders were well adjusted, with levels of cognitive functioning that varied widely between individuals. Aging was certainly associated with an increased likelihood of chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, arthritis and sensory impairments—deafness or vision problems—all of which might compromise sustained engagement with the legal process. However, the APA report stressed that for older adults living in the community, two thirds reported their health to be as good as or better than that of their peers. Indeed, in the absence of cognitive impairment, older adults were likely to report lower levels of diagnosable depression compared with younger age groups and higher levels of life satisfaction (APA, 1997). The APA report also cautioned against attempting to impose uniform methods of testing with older and younger adults and the consequent drawing of invidious conclusions from too narrow a range of talents. Supporters of the Positive Psychology movement have also questioned the narrative that represents the elderly in terms of deficits rather than recognizing and celebrating their assets and strengths. Ranzijn (2002), for instance, has argued that many standardized tasks and psychological testing situations—which could include many used in forensic research—may have low ecological validity or significance for the elderly. Ranzijn argued that with age comes experience of dealing with ambiguity and tests that tap into the ability to deal with uncertainty and contradiction—features very much present in our trial system—will show elders in a better light. He also stressed the value that the elderly can bring to community development and citizenship—qualities associated with a readiness to report offences such as vandalism—and that the elderly should be viewed as a resource rather than a burden.

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Any judgment on the admissibility and credibility of elder evidence needs to be based on the perceived competence of the individual and the precise circumstances of the alleged incident. Such a judgment must also be tempered by the degree of support available to the witness prior to and during court proceedings. As we illustrate in the following, some legislatures now acknowledge that the elderly witness may have special needs, consideration of which will enable them to give their best evidence. We illustrate some examples of recent procedural innovations for the elderly, with special reference to the UK experience.

Support for Elderly Witnesses at Court Elders testifying in court in the United Kingdom and North America will do so under the adversarial system of justice, derived from English Common Law (Simester & Sullivan, 2012). An important feature of the adversarial system is that the prosecution must prove their case against the defendant beyond reasonable doubt. It is the responsibility of the defence advocate to undermine the prosecution case rather than necessarily to prove their client’s innocence. One of the key mechanisms in discrediting a case is the cross-examination of prosecution witnesses. When witnesses are elderly, such a process will inevitably involve attempts to find inconsistencies in their account and to highlight any gaps or failings of recall. The cross-examination of vulnerable witnesses can tip too readily from legitimate probing into intimidation. In the United Kingdom, the judicial rules on cross-examination specifically permit the use of leading questions, and such questions may make up a quarter of all questions asked in this phase of the trial (Kebbell, Deprez, & Wagstaff, 2003). Other tactics employed in crossexamination include repeatedly asking the same question in different ways in the hope of eliciting a different answer or asking about events in a haphazard order rather than following the sequence of events (Spencer & Flin, 1993). It is up to opposing counsel to object and, ultimately, the judge to ensure that exploitation of witness vulnerability under cross-examination is minimized. Judges have varied in their readiness to curtail invidious aspects of crossexamination: some judges regard their role as akin to a referee in a sporting contest, confining their interventions to violations of the rules of evidence. The English Witness Charter (Office for Criminal Justice Reform, 2007b) now encourages judges to more actively intervene, reflecting the view that they have a duty to protect witnesses who may already have been victims of abuse, from being further abused by officers of the court. A number of jurisdictions have legislated to provide additional support for vulnerable witnesses and protect them from the worst excesses of the adversarial system while retaining its principles. Children are a clearly definable group and in recent years much legislation has been devoted toward facilitating the taking and presentation of children’s evidence (see Hall & Sales, 2008, for a comprehensive review). Few legislatures make similar provisions for elder witnesses, who may face many of the same issues that confront children, including intimidation, unfamiliarity with the legal process and the frequently taxing nature of cross-examination. While children

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may face difficulties due to immature cognitive functioning, elders may suffer from progressive cognitive impairments or reluctance to expose themselves to aversive interactions which impact on their ability as witnesses at court, as our earlier review has emphasized. The United Kingdom was one of the first countries to recognize that vulnerable witnesses in general might need additional assistance in giving their evidence and later to recognize explicitly that the elderly might require specific help. The UK experience is worthy of study for the successes and pitfalls of legislation that attempts to provide support for older witnesses, before, during and after giving their evidence in court.

Assisting the Elderly Within the Court System: Experience in the United Kingdom Video Comes to Court The need for variation in the methods of taking and examining evidence at court had been first recognized in relation to child witnesses in the 1988 Criminal Justice Act, which introduced the use of live television links into the courts to enable children to testify from outside the courtroom, thus avoiding the need to view an accused when giving evidence, a proven stressor (Peters, 1991) or the need to enter the alien and unfamiliar surroundings of the court itself. Research suggested that this innovation was judged as successful in addressing the special needs of children while maintaining the adversarial principles of English law (Davies & Noon, 1991). The 1991 Criminal Justice Act included provision for prerecorded videotaped interviews with child complainants to be shown at court in place of live examination-in-chief on the day of the trial. The perceived advantages of this innovation were that evidence could be taken when the alleged events were still fresh in the witnesses’ memory and to enable interviews to be conducted by specially trained police officers and social workers in less formal settings than the courtroom. After a predictably cautious reception from the courts, these two innovations rapidly became established features of cases involving child complainants, particularly of sexual abuse (Davies, Wilson, Mitchell, & Milsom, 1995). ‘Special Measures’ In 1997 a new government was elected in the United Kingdom with a commitment to provide greater protection and encouragement for vulnerable victims of, and witnesses to, crime. One of the first acts of the new minister in charge of the courts was to set up a committee drawing on personnel from a range of relevant government departments with a broad remit to consider this issue. The resulting report, Speaking Up for Justice (Home Office, 1998) identified a range of measures designed to improve the treatment of vulnerable witnesses at all stages of the criminal justice process and ensure that they would be able to give their best evidence. Discussion of the elderly as a specific vulnerable group was not included

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in the report, mainly because of a lack of research on the impact of the criminal justice system at the time the report was prepared (Phillips, Worrall, & Brammer, 2000). The 1999 Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act proposed a number of variations from traditional procedures (termed ‘Special Measures’) to assist vulnerable and/or intimidated witnesses of all ages to give their best evidence. Vulnerable witnesses were separately defined as • • • • •

children under 17 years of age, witnesses with a physical disability or disorder, witnesses with a learning disability or mental disorder, distressed witnesses (including victims of sexual offences), and witnesses in fear of intimidation.

An additional measure, which would have allowed a prerecorded crossexamination to replace a live process at court was included in the original Act but never implemented, largely due to resistance from the legal profession and logistical problems. Although elderly witnesses, as such, were not specifically identified as a group in this original list, it can be seen that elderly persons could qualify under all but the first category of vulnerability. The Act was rapidly put into effect with all-party support, and elderly witnesses, alongside other vulnerable groups, have continued to benefit from its provisions. Normally, an application to use Special Measures is made prior to the trial to the presiding judge who has discretion as to whether an application will be granted and what specific measures should be put in place. There is also provision for the granting of Special Measures on the day of the trial and, exceptionally, during the trial itself, if a need becomes apparent. The Act permits application to be made for one or more of the following Special Measures, depending upon an assessment of the needs of the particular witness: • • • • • • •

screens—to ensure that the witness does not see the defendant when giving their evidence; Live TV link—allowing a witness to give evidence from outside the court via CCTV; videorecorded evidence-in-chief—a prerecorded formal interview with the witness; clearing the public gallery of the court—to allow evidence to be given in private; removal of court dress (wigs and gowns)—to reduce formality for the witness; communication aids, such as alphabet or symbol boards—for witnesses with communication difficulties; and intermediaries—to assist the witness in communicating with counsel and the court.

The Special Measures included few novel innovations. The use of Live TV links and prerecorded video interviews had been developed and refined

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through their use with children. Other Special Measures, including the removal of formal court dress, the imposition of screens between witness and defendant and the clearing of courtrooms had already been adopted as best practice by individual judges and were now recognized formally in statute. Intermediaries The one real innovation was the introduction of intermediaries. A National Register of Intermediaries operated by the Ministry of Justice contains contact details of speech and language therapists, clinical psychologists and mental health and special needs professionals who are trained to assist witnesses with communication difficulties. Intermediaries were originally envisaged as operating only during court proceedings, but custom and practice has greatly extended their role: they can be involved at all stages of an investigation stage through to the trial (Plotnikoff & Woolfson, 2007). During formal police interviews, intermediaries can assist by explaining questions to the witness in words they understand and interpreting their answers. Prior to trial, they can accompany the witness on familiarization visits to the court and any pretrial meetings. At trial, they can assist the judge and the lawyers involved by describing for the court any particular communication or comprehension difficulties a witness may have and intervening to offer advice if the witness shows evidence of misunderstanding a question. The involvement of an intermediary at trial is at the discretion of the presiding judge, on application from the prosecution or defence lawyer calling the witness. Each intermediary must swear an oath to communicate a true account of what the witness has said (O’Mahony, 2008–2009). An evaluation of the Intermediary scheme (Plotnikoff & Woolfson, 2007) reported that at the end of the 2-year trial period, the largest group (57%) of witnesses who were assisted had impairments of intelligence or social functioning, and 61% of clients were adults. No separate figures were provided on the age of the adults concerned, though clearly the scheme would be of potential benefit to elderly witnesses with speech production and communication problems. The great majority of intermediaries were employed during the investigative and pretrial phases, and few had appeared at court by the end of the trial period. Almost all court users reported finding the intermediaries of value; Plotnikoff and Woolfson (2007) quoted one judge as saying, ‘Overall, the intermediary worked very well. She was strong and intervened when questions became too complex. Her interventions did not come too often but they were invaluable. The intermediary would be very welcome in any court I sat in’ (pp. 60). As a result of the success of the preliminary trials, the intermediary scheme was introduced throughout England and Wales in 2008, and the Scottish Government expressed interest in introducing a similar scheme (Criminal Justice Directorate, 2007). Intermediaries or advocates for older adults are widely employed in other health and social care settings, and their effectiveness seems well established (e.g. Welsh Assembly Government, 2010).

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Special Measures in Practice An official survey shortly after the inception of the scheme by Hamlyn, Phelps, Turtle and Sattar (2004) contacted and questioned more than 500 witnesses identified as vulnerable about their experiences at court before the onset of the new Act and a same-sized group after the Act had been implemented. Some 66% of those interviewed before the Act and 58% of those seen afterward were adults, but the proportion of these who were elderly is again not separately tabulated. The largest group of offences in which the Act was invoked concerned cases of violence against the person, both serious (17%) and less serious (29%), followed by sexual offences (17%). Self-reports by witnesses suggested that intimidation, either feared (34%) or actual (35%), formed the largest single cause of vulnerability, mainly from the defendant or the defendant’s family and friends. This was followed by psychological and emotional problems (35%), but again no figures are separately available for older witnesses. Video and the Elderly The availability to adults of the Live TV link led to a modest take-up of the facility—just 15% used this method of remote testimony (as opposed to 83% of children). Again, it is not clear what proportion of these adults were elderly. Older people may be reluctant to seek help of this kind, particularly because it involves the use of a new and an unfamiliar technology. Yet not having to face the accused in open court may be of particular value in cases of harassment, where neighbours have made life intolerable for an older person over extended periods of time and where there has been an element of intimidation. Just 5% of adults reported that they had been offered the opportunity to give prerecorded testimony. We note that the availability of the latter Measure was still being introduced at the time the survey was conducted, and there is some anecdotal evidence that its use with older adults has become more widespread. The benefits of video testimony are underlined by recent court rulings that witness competency at the time of trial is not a prohibition on the admissibility of previous video interviews. In the case of R v D (Video testimony) (2002), an 81-year-old woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease had made a cogent allegation in a videotaped interview, but there was some delay before the matter came to court. As a result of some of her answers at court, the defence raised the question of her continuing competence as a witness. The court ruled that it was not necessary for a person to understand all questions or give understandable answers. It was sufficient if there was an intelligible thread in responses to questions, even if patchy, which could be evaluated for cogency and reliability by the jury who also would have seen her earlier video statement. The alleged victim had a right to justice, and it was part of the process of justice that her voice should be heard. A more recent legal judgment, DPP v R (2007), suggested that provided a video interview is available, it is not necessary for the alleged victim to even be able to recall the events at court. A 13-year-old girl with a severe mental handicap

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had complained of sexual assault, had been interviewed on video by the police and had given an account described as ‘cogent’. Her interview was tendered as the prosecution case at the subsequent trial, but when she was cross-examined she could not now recall any of the events she had alleged. The court ruled that she was competent at the time she made the recording and the video had been properly admitted under the Special Measures provision. The fact that she could no longer recall the events did not invalidate her competency. This ruling seems to offer the possibility that elder persons suffering from a progressive condition affecting memory might have their earlier recorded statement admitted as evidence, even if their current condition precludes memory for the alleged event. In the Louisiana case cited at the beginning of this chapter, both examination and cross-examination of the elderly victim were recorded for the purposes of being played at a later trial, much in the manner of the now-abandoned Special Measure introduced as part of the 1999 Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act in England. However, it would be very unusual for such evidence to be admitted in a criminal trial in the United States, unless the victim was still available and competent to give evidence (Heisler, 2000). The sixth amendment to the US Constitution lays down the right of a defendant to confront their accuser at court in front of a jury. A civil court might admit prerecorded testimony from deceased victims if damages were being sought for neglect, as has occurred in proceedings against some American care homes (Wasarhaley, 2010), but this solution would not normally apply in criminal cases. Other Special Measures Hamlyn et al. (2004) reported that the removal of formal court dress was a Measure much more often used in the case of child witnesses—in all 25% of children benefited from this facility compared with 15% overall. Older persons are arguably more familiar with the appearance of judges and others in court dress and would, perhaps, be less likely to be intimidated by costume alone. Indeed, there is an argument, given the general positive regard shown by the elderly toward authority figures such as court officials (Yarmey, 2000), for judges and advocates to dress in line with their expectations. Clearing the court was always available at the discretion of the presiding judge, and Hamlyn et al.’s survey suggests that making it formally available had little impact on its use, with a rise from 8% to 10% subsequent to the Act. Again, this facility was perhaps drawn up with children in mind: cases of child sexual abuse have always attracted a prurient minority of spectators. Greater take-up might have been expected of the use of communication aids, given the frequency of impairments in speech and hearing in the older population. However, Hamlyn et al. found no instances of the use of this facility in the thousand-plus cases making up their total sample. The lack of take-up of this provision is surprising and suggests, perhaps, that at the time Special Measures were introduced, prosecutors showed little enthusiasm for putting witnesses or victims with communication impairments into the witness box. No further surveys of this kind have been conducted subsequently, so the frequency of use of this Measure is unknown.

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There is no doubt that the Special Measure’s provision embodied in the 1999 legislation continues to have a positive influence on the quality of evidence and personal welfare of vulnerable witnesses in general, though the existing evidence for their use specifically by older persons is lacking. Hamlyn et al.’s (2004) survey found that around a third of all witnesses said they would not have been able to give their evidence but for the availability of Special Measures. However, there were many other concerns about the legal process that were not covered by the Special Measures legislation. These arose initially with children but are equally applicable to the elderly. They included pretrial delays; an absence of information for witnesses, particularly over case progress and a lack of consultation over what Special Measures were appropriate (Plotnikoff & Woolfson, 2004). In response to such concerns, the government set up an interdepartmental Office for Criminal Justice Reform in 2004, bringing together officials from the police, prosecution service and the courts to try to orchestrate action for victims, but this initiative did not survive government cutbacks in 2010. ‘No Witness, No Justice’ One initiative, driven by the police and the prosecution service was the ‘No Witness, No Justice’ initiative launched in 2003 aimed at addressing concerns over the lack of information and procedural delays (Office for Criminal Justice Reform, 2006). Witness Care Units were set up in all the Crown Court Centres in England and Wales. They were designed to provide a single point of contact for all victims and witnesses who were likely to be called to trial, to conduct a needs assessment for vulnerable witnesses and to keep witnesses informed of the progress and outcome of the case. Early pilot studies showed an increase in attendance of witnesses at trial of 20% and a 17% drop in ineffective trials caused by witnesses withdrawing their statements (Office for Criminal Justice Reform, 2006). Again, it is not clear how many elderly persons have benefited from this new service. Victim Personal Statements During the pilot period for ‘No Witness, No Justice’, the numbers of Victim Personal Statements had increased more than sevenfold. Such statements, which remain optional, allow all vulnerable witnesses, particularly the elderly, to explain to the court what affect the crime has had on them, their wishes and needs during the case and any concerns they may have about intimidation and personal safety (Crown Prosecution Service, 2008a). Witness Charter The Charter was introduced in 2007 (Office for Criminal Justice Reform, 2007a) and set out fresh standards for the different agencies within the criminal justice system to achieve for all witnesses, including the elderly. Standard 8 of the Charter covers witness intimidation and pledges that the police will deal promptly with any complaints. The official guidance to police officers on dealing with witnesses, Achieving Best Evidence in Criminal Cases (Office for Criminal Justice

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Reform, 2007b) also was revised to contain much more information on how officers could combat intimidation and reassure witnesses. The Charter acknowledged the concerns regarding delays in fixing trials and promised that witnesses identified as vulnerable were to receive greater priority as regard times and dates (Standard 13). It formalized a provision whereby members of the Witness Service—a state-funded but independent organization that offers information and support to witnesses for prosecution and defence—to attend court with witnesses when required (Standard 19). Under yet another Code of Practice—The Victims’ Code (Office of Criminal Justice Reform, 2005)—the police were obliged to put vulnerable persons in touch with this body. With the permission of the presiding judge or magistrate, Witness Service personnel were able for the first time to accompany witnesses into the Live TV link room or the courtroom. Finally, Standard 29 pledges that the client’s lawyer would intervene if questioning in cross-examination was ‘unfair, offensive or oppressive’ (p. 14). Restorative Justice Like many other developed countries, the United Kingdom has seen the growth in recent years in the use of ‘restorative justice’ (RJ) as a way of resolving how to deal with the aftermath of an admitted offence and its implications for the victim and offender. Typically, following a conviction and as an integral part of the sentence, a meeting will be agreed on between the two parties, convened by a court-appointed facilitator. At the meeting, the victim is given the opportunity to explain the impact of the crime on themselves, and the offender has the opportunity to apologize, offer assurances as to his or her future conduct toward the victim and perhaps offer reparation, in the form of unpaid work for the victim (e.g. a broken window replaced; graffiti painted over). The claims for RJ are that it provides greater satisfaction for the victim and a greater degree of engagement with the consequences of their offence for the perpetrator (Crown Prosecution Service, n.d.). RJ was first widely used in relation to juvenile crime, but in 2013, the UK Government introduced the Crime and Courts Bill that will extend RJ to adult offences (Restorative Justice Council, 2013). Some more assertive elderly victims may welcome the opportunity to explain to perpetrators the consequences of thoughtless actions. However, others may be so terrified by their experiences of what the law sees as ‘minor’ crime that they will want no part in confronting their offenders: involvement in RJ is voluntary for both parties. Another danger with RJ is of ‘mission creep’, whereby governments, anxious to reduce the exorbitant costs of imprisoning offenders, extend RJ to ever more serious crimes, such as abuse of the elderly in home settings, which arguably merit more serious punishment than that represented by this new measure (Filipovic, 2013). The ‘Prosecuting Crimes Against Older People’ Initiative Despite all the special measures introduced for vulnerable witnesses, there were no policies specifically directed to the particular problems of the elderly

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until 2008, when the Director of Public Prosecutions launched a major policy statement on improving the treatment of the elderly by the courts (Crown Prosecution Service, 2008a). However, the document was disappointing: it largely restated the facilities already available to vulnerable witnesses without introducing many new initiatives. It mentioned the existing range of Special Measures but added that the court might also take account of ‘fluctuating capacity’: some cognitively vulnerable persons might benefit from being able to give their evidence at particular times of the day when they were at their most mentally alert. The court could also set aside time for older witnesses to take any medication that they normally required (Crown Prosecution Service, 2009). An adjunct to the main document prepared specifically for the guidance of prosecutors (Crown Prosecution Service, 2008b) contained more detailed practical information as to how the courts should respond to the needs of elderly witnesses. Guidance was provided on competency issues. It underlined that competency was not an all-or-none matter: capacity to bear witness could fluctuate ‘over time, even over the course of the day’ (para. 43). Prosecutors were encouraged to seek the advice of the witness’ doctor, family member or social worker as to their witness competency. It underlined that the revised competency requirement laid down in the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act (1999) merely required the witness have the capacity to understand questions asked of them and give replies which could be understood or relayed in intelligible form by an intermediary (Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act, 1999, para. 42). Where competency is an issue, prosecutors are expected to undertake a pretrial interview before reaching a final decision (Crown Prosecution Service, 2008b, para. 52–57). Where an elderly person is deemed not to be competent, consideration should be given to building a case which does not rely on the victim’s statement, which could rely on expert testimony regarding injuries or symptoms (Crown Prosecution Service, 2008b, para. 62–63) or, if this proved impossible, seeking assistance from the police and social services to ensure the safety of the alleged victim (para. 61). This recent and belated concern for crime among the elderly does seem to be having some positive impact, both on the number of cases being brought forward to trial and the rates of prosecution in England and Wales. The figures show a steady increase in recent years: in 2012 some 2,242 persons were charged with crimes against older people, a threefold increase over 2008. Successful prosecutions were achieved in 81% of cases, with 17% failing because of witnesses being unable to provide crucial evidence on the day. However, many cases fail to come to trial at all because of legal reasons, including the inability of the victim to testify at trial (Crown Prosecution Service, 2012). Scottish Variations Scotland has always prided itself on having a legal system different in some important respects from England’s, but it shares a common concern for the welfare of vulnerable witnesses, including the elderly. Older Scottish witnesses may use a similar range of Special Measures including the use of screens and

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the Live TV link to give their evidence. However, the Special Measure concerning prerecorded evidence differs from England and Wales, and the provisions for the use of supporters at court are more developed than those in England (Scottish Executive, 2005). Admission of Prior Statements Prior statements by witnesses can include, but are not confined to, video interviews as in England and Wales. In Scotland, any written statement made to a police officer can be tendered as part or all of the prosecution evidence, subject to the agreement of the judge. Unless both sides agree, the witness is required to attend court to be cross-examined on his or her statement. The added flexibility over the nature of the prior statement may be of value to older witnesses who might object to the formality of video recording or have communication difficulties or other impairments that might impair or preclude their attendance at an interview suite. Taking Evidence by a Commissioner The prior use of a commissioner to take a statement may obviate the need for the witness to attend court altogether. This Special Measure is designed for those with progressive medical or psychological conditions or other compelling reasons that make it necessary to take a statement of their evidence prior to trial. The court appoints a commissioner—typically a judge or experienced solicitor— who takes evidence from the witness, and this interview is videorecorded. The accused and/or his or her legal representative are not physically present during the interview but watch the proceedings on a television monitor from another room. The interview can be paused should the witness need to take medication, rest or require a comfort break. When the commissioner has completed the taking of evidence, the attorney for the defence can put their questions to the witness, and these, too, are recorded. The commissioner’s role at this point is that of a presiding judge: to ensure that the rules of evidence are followed and that the witness’ welfare is not unduly compromised. The court may also grant this Special Measure in conjunction with the presence of a supporter to provide additional safeguards for the witness. At any subsequent trial, the full recording is played to the court and represents the totality of the witness’s evidence. Taking evidence in this way may have significant advantages for elderly witnesses who, for health reasons, may be unable or unlikely to give evidence at trial. Supporters The presence in court of a supporter is permitted in the English and Scottish jurisdictions, but the supporter’s role is more elaborated in the Scottish guidance. The choice of a supporter is more liberal than the corresponding English legislation: this person can be someone previously unknown to the witness

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who is provided by the local Witness Support team. Alternatively they can be a friend or family member if he or she is not a party to the proceedings. The Guidance sets out in detail the function of supporters. They include providing social support, before, during and after giving evidence. Support can be offered by their physical presence—supporters can sit beside the witness while waiting to give evidence. When evidence is being taken, the supporter may, with the permission of the judge, sit adjacent to the witness box and within sight of the witness. Supporters can also bring to the court’s attention any signs of undue distress shown by the witness that have not being noticed by the presiding judge. They may also accompany the witness in moving about the court building and ensure that there is no inadvertent contact with the defendant, for instance in the waiting room, toilets or cafeteria. The supporter may also answer any queries the witness may have concerning the course of the proceedings and keep the witness company during any adjournments. Although total ignorance of the nature of the trial is not a precondition of being a supporter, it is essential that the supporter not discuss the case with the witness, nor should he or she attempt to influence the content of the witness’s evidence by word, gesture or facial expression. Supporters may also accompany the witness should the witness give evidence via a remote video link or at an identification procedure.

Conclusions on the British Experience It is evident that concerns over justice for vulnerable victims in the United Kingdom have led to a plethora of procedural innovations designed to facilitate the gathering and giving of evidence. Vulnerable witnesses implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, include older adults, but it is not clear whether all or just some of this group are covered by the legislation. Much will depend on the vigilance and awareness of police and social services and officers of the court. Although the blanket application of Special Measures to all those aged 65 and over would alienate many fit and healthy older persons, selective use runs the risk of missing eligible victims who would benefit from support. Research has long demonstrated that desk sergeants are ineffective in detecting vulnerable suspects in need of support at the police station (Gudjonsson, Clare, Rutter, & Pearse, 1993), and as a consequence, additional guidance has been provided to assist officers in detecting vulnerability in victims (Ministry of Justice, 2011), but there is little evidence as yet that such initiatives have increased the accuracy of targeting those in need. In the wake of the introduction of Special Measures in England and Wales, Burton, Evens and Sanders (2006) tracked cases to see if vulnerable witnesses in need of such measures were being successfully identified. They concluded that the numbers of vulnerable witnesses being recorded by the police and the courts were a gross underestimate of the problem. Although most child witnesses were being readily identified, other less readily identifiable groups, such as those with physical or mental vulnerabilities or those in fear and distress, were frequently missed by all agencies. On the basis of their interview data and using conservative assumptions, Burton et al. estimated that some 24% of all witnesses coming

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to court met the criteria for Special Measures, nearly 3 times as much as the official estimate of 9%. How many of these ‘missed’ cases were elderly is not clear from their data. More generally, successive governments in the United Kingdom have been quick to announce new initiatives which cater for the needs of elderly witnesses but much less responsive in following these schemes through to assess their effectiveness and so identify gaps and overlaps in provision or those which were ineffective or in need of radical revision (Help the Aged, 2004).

Practice in Other Jurisdictions Other judiciaries with an adversarial tradition share many of the same concerns found in the United Kingdom over the plight of elderly victims of crime, particularly elder abuse within care settings (Rothman, Dunlop, & Entzel, 2000). The use of victim impact statements for victims of all ages is widely available, for instance in Australia and the United States (Szmania & Gracyalny, 2006). Likewise, RJ is commonplace in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but has yet to make a judicial impact in the United States (Beale, 2003). However, there appear to have been few examples of coordinated national programs of procedural reform specifically aimed at easing the plight of elders in giving evidence. In the United States, for instance, the American Bar Association (ABA), concerned by the rising incidence of elder abuse, recently proposed a resolution demanding more speedy and efficient handling of such cases. They identified five court centres built exclusively for hearing cases involving older adults and called for a vigorous expansion of such provision. However, the resolution makes no reference to any procedural changes to assist the elderly witness (ABA, 2012). Earlier, in 1991, the ABA had addressed the issue of the needs of elderly witnesses at court, but their recommendations dealt principally with the physical needs of older adults. There was an emphasis on making the court buildings more accessible and user friendly through the provision of amplification of speech, enlarged typefaces on court documents and enhanced levels of temperature control and lighting (ABA, 1991). More radical amendments to procedure of the kind in use in the United Kingdom were not discussed, perhaps because such innovations would be open to Constitutional challenge (Adams, 2000). Elders are guaranteed equal treatment under the law by the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and this has prompted some state court systems to enhance provision for the elderly witness. The New York City Elder Abuse Training Project (n.d.) encourages the use of supporters to accompany witnesses to court as well as special facilities for those with sensory impairments. They also advise that courts give consideration to fluctuating capacity and medication requirements in scheduling hearings and the use of expert witnesses where competency is an issue. What of countries that follow a different legal code? The inquisitorial system is based on the French ‘Code Napoleon’ and is the commonplace approach to justice in much of Europe and those parts of Africa and Asia that were once under French or German rule (Ward & Akhtar, 2011). The inquisitorial system of justice has as its goal establishing the facts about a crime rather than proving

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a case. The accused is legally represented in the same way as in the adversarial system, but the judge is also an active investigator in the case as well as an arbiter. Judges and advocates may question the witnesses. Typically, verdicts are decided by a judge sitting with lay assessors, and there is no jury. There is less emphasis on the diagnostic value of testimony given in open court and a greater receptiveness to other sources of information and expertise in assessing witness evidence (Delmas-Marty & Spencer, 2002). In Germany, for instance, the credibility of child witnesses in abuse allegations is assessed by specially trained psychologists who give the court their opinion based on an analysis of the child’s original statement combined with the results of assessments of suggestibility and level of intellectual development (Vrij, 2008). For the elderly, perhaps, the lowered emphasis on the ‘testing’ of testimony through cross-examination in open court is an attractive feature of the inquisitorial system that may reduce, but certainly not eliminate, the risk of secondary traumatization arising from legal proceedings. Judiciaries run on inquisitorial principles have also made some efforts to accommodate and support the older witnesses. One documented example is Sweden, where criminal cases are heard by a judge and three lay assessors. The current official advice to victims of crime (Sveriges Domstolar, n.d.) advises those who are afraid of speaking in front of the accused to inform the court, and the judge may decide that the accused should be excluded from the court during the duration of their testimony. Separate waiting rooms for witnesses are available in some, but not all, Swedish courts. Social support is available through a court-appointed witness support person (Vittnesstod) who accompanies the witness at court, explains the court proceedings when necessary and sits beside the prosecutor during their testimony. Where witnesses have been victims of serious crimes, such as sexual offences or robbery, the court may appoint an attorney whose specific remit is to protect the interests of the victim. Children involved in familial abuse cases routinely qualify for such special representation, but there is no specific provision for the elderly. The initiative for requesting any special support seems to lie with the witness rather than with the court and its officers as in the United Kingdom. Leaving it to the witness avoids many of the problems of the police or the court officials failing to identify vulnerable victims but runs the risk that those who are most in need of assistance will not seek help when it is necessary.

Summary and Conclusions As our opening case vignette illustrates, offences involving elderly victims cause concern and controversy among the public at large as well as offering major challenges to the criminal justice system. Given the long-term demographic changes operating in most modern industrialized societies, the numbers of elderly persons coming to court as witnesses will continue to rise. The studies of police officers’, legal professionals’ and potential jurors’ attitudes toward elderly witnesses discussed earlier in the chapter show striking divergences in outcome. Much appears to depend on the witnesses’ social status and individual personalities and

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how they present themselves at court. There is some encouraging evidence that any initial stereotypes, both positive and negative, can be modulated by actual experience of individual elders giving their accounts. Further research needs to be undertaken to identify the circumstances in which veridical rather than stereotypical judgments are most likely to be made in forensic settings and in training attorneys in techniques of examining older witnesses on the stand. In contrast to the limited research on attitudes toward the elderly, a great deal of laboratory research has been conducted on the cognitive competencies of the elderly. As our brief review has emphasized, compared with healthy young adults, older witnesses show a general deterioration in most aspects of episodic memory performance, but semantic and procedural memory is much better preserved. However, these trends conceal widespread variation in the rate of decline, and witness age as such is an uncertain determinant of competency. Moreover, as with witnesses of all ages, situational factors will influence the quality and completeness of accounts. Individual assessment by prosecutors is essential, supplemented if necessary by an expert assessment and report to the court. Older witnesses’ performance will inevitably be influenced by the procedural demands placed on them by the police and other investigators. As other chapters in this book attest, psychologists have begun to examine how elders perform on standard procedures for eliciting evidence, including the Cognitive Interview and identification from line-ups. With some exceptions (e.g. Wright & Holliday, 2007), much of the existing research treats ‘the elderly’ as a homogeneous group, whereas medical and cognitive research reviewed earlier in this chapter emphasizes that elders vary in their ages and stages of cognitive competence. We look forward to studies that contrast persons diagnosed as possessing ‘mild cognitive impairment’ as opposed to ‘benign senescent forgetfulness’ on their performance on realistic eyewitness tasks. As our review demonstrates, the support an elderly person can rely on at court in giving evidence will depend on the readiness of the judicial system to adopt its procedures to the special requirements of the elderly. As we have observed, some enabling techniques, such as the use of supporters, enhanced sensory aids and victim impact statements are widely available, irrespective of whether judiciaries employ the adversarial or the inquisitorial approaches to justice. However, other measures that require moderation of traditional features of the adversarial system cause more controversy. The United Kingdom, with its experience in the routine use of in-court television links and prerecorded interviews for child witnesses, has extended this facility to other vulnerable groups, including the elderly. However, such procedures face widespread resistance in the United States because of potential violations of the accused’s rights under the sixth amendment to the Constitution. Systematic research on the use and effectiveness of these and similar enabling procedures is urgently required. Most importantly, there is a need to begin considering the dilemmas of older witnesses at court from the standpoint of the needs and concerns of the elders themselves. Proscribing on the basis of what seems to work for children at court offers a very imperfect solution. We know surprisingly

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little about how older witnesses see their own predicament. Tailored interventions and statute changes are required which address demonstrable concerns of older witnesses while still preserving the delicate balance between prosecution and defence, which is the basis of all democratic criminal justice systems.

Postscript Just as we had completed this chapter, the conclusion of the Louisiana case was announced. The defendant waived his right to trial by jury and as a result, the recorded testimony and cross-examination of the victim was played in court. The court learned that the defendant’s DNA was recovered from the victim’s clothing, his cap was left at the crime scene and the victim’s blood was found on his clothing. The defendant was found guilty and awaits sentence. The 94-year-old victim lived to see her testimony vindicated and justice done (Schmidt, 2013). Author Note: We thank Pär-Anders Granhag, Steven Clark, Don Thomson and Dan Yarmey for their assistance in locating information on the treatment of elderly witnesses in the courts of Sweden, the United States, Australia and Canada respectively; in addition, Heather Flowe and the editors provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Note 1. For the purposes of this chapter, the terms elderly, elders and older are used interchangeably and refer to persons over the age of 65 years, unless otherwise stated.

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15 Testimony by the Elderly in the Eyes of the Jury The Impact of Juror Characteristics Anna E. Pittman, Michael P. Toglia, Christopher T. Leone, and Katrin U. Mueller-Johnson When eyewitnesses take the stand, the way in which they are perceived may influence the outcome of a case. Similarly, whether jurors see witnesses as trustworthy, confident, and honest is important and may affect the fate of individuals on trial (Cramer, Brodsky, & DeCoster, 2009). This potential impact begs the question, how and why does age matter? Are some witnesses viewed as less credible simply because of their age? Researchers over the past 30 years have tried to answer these questions by exploring effects of age on perceived credibility of older eyewitnesses. Because the elderly population has grown over the past few decades, interest in such questions has increased (for more information, see the Center for Elders and the Courts website: http://www.eldrersandcourts.org). The World Health Organization has projected that by the year 2050 there will be approximately 2 billion people worldwide aged 60 years or older. Furthermore, the elderly population across the globe has doubled in size since 1980 and is projected to double again between the years 2000 and 2050 (World Health Organization, 2012). These changes may result in a greater likelihood that the elderly will be exposed to crimes more often and, therefore, may increasingly be witnesses to crimes in the coming years. This point was made as early as the mid-1990s (Bornstein, 1995). For these reasons, it is extremely important that we know how the elderly testify and that we understand how the general public, as possible jurors, reacts to and perceives older witnesses. Several aspects determine the perceived credibility of an older adult witness (Hummert, Garstka, & Shaner, 1997). First of all, there is the objective performance of the witness in the particular eyewitness situation itself, that is, the credibility of the particular eyewitness account. A good eyewitness account is considered to be one that is accurate and comprehensive. There is accumulating research evidence that testimony provided by older adults may differ from that provided by younger adults, and thus the first part of this chapter provides a brief overview of the main objective differences in testimony (more in-depth treatment of these issues is provided in other chapters in this volume). A second aspect of the credibility of older witnesses is determined by social cognition. Given that in a specific case, decision makers usually have limited information

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about how accurate and complete the witness’s account itself is (because there is no objective record of the incident), a perceiver also will rely on other cues; of particular interest for this chapter, they might rely on age. For this reason there is a growing body of evidence investigating how older witnesses are perceived compared with younger witnesses when the actual quality of the testimony is kept constant (Mueller-Johnson, Toglia, Sweeney, & Ceci, 2007; Ross, Dunning, Toglia, & Ceci, 1990). One other factor impacting credibility judgments is the confidence with which a witness testifies, a factor shown to be particularly influential when jurors try to infer accuracy of a witness, even though the correlation between actual accuracy and confidence is low (Brigham & Bothwell, 1983; Penrod & Cutler, 1995). Another is the perceived witness’ motivation to tell the truth. Again, there is evidence that older adults are perceived differently on these variables than younger witnesses, and this is reviewed in the ensuing part of the chapter. Like all decision makers, jurors making inferences about witness performance and truthfulness are susceptible to the influence of stereotypes. Ageist stereotypes have been shown to be very prevalent in Western culture; for example, as Cuddy and Fiske (2002) found, older adults are typically thought of as warm and kind, yet they also are stereotyped as being incompetent and overall “doddering but dear” (p. 4). Some evidence exists showing that variability in credibility judgments may be due to differences in stereotypical beliefs held by jurors as well as in stereotypical appearance of the witness. Discussion of the potential role of stereotypes forms the next part of the chapter. Finally, there are certain personality traits, such as a preference for thinking effortlessly (low need for cognition [NFC]), that make the use of stereotypes of any kind more likely (Petty, Brińol, Loersch, & McCaslin, 2009). There is very little research on the interaction of older witnesses and juror personality characteristics, and therefore we describe a first study investigating the link between NFC in jurors and perceived credibility of older witnesses. We end this chapter with a summarizing model of how all these factors interact in influencing credibility judgments concerning older witnesses.

Overview of General Memory and Older Adult Memory Memory can be semantic, episodic, or prospective. In his seminal work, Tulving (1972) argued for distinguishing episodic and semantic memory, describing the former as a form more representative of personal experiences, life events, and everyday occurrences and the latter as memory for facts and concepts. A discussion regarding episodic memory among older adults, to which we now turn, is particularly relevant to eyewitness testimony because eyewitness memory involves specific events and details such as people, time, and place. The aging process brings with it a decline in episodic memory, leading to significant differences in episodic memory performance between younger and older adults (Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008; Shing et al., 2010). Compared with younger adults, the elderly typically perform significantly worse

Impact of Juror Characteristics 365 on free-recall tasks and have difficulty remembering contextual information surrounding an event. For instance, Piolino et al. (2010) found that with respect to autobiographical memory, older adults (aged 65–89 years) recalled fewer episodic details than did younger adults (aged 20–33 years). The elderly also had greater difficulty recalling specific contextual information from autobiographical events than they did when remembering general events experienced in the past. Other researchers, examining very similar age ranges, also have found that younger adults give more details about specific features of a witnessed event, whereas older adults tend to remember the overall general “picture” of what they witnessed (Aizpurua, García-Bajos, & Migueles, 2008; García-Bajos, Migueles, & Aizpurua, 2012; Yarmey & Kent, 1980). Thus the consistent findings that emerge are that the elderly may rely more on schematic or gist representations and less on verbatim aspects of events than younger adults (see also Souchay, Moulin, Clarys, Taconnat, & Isingrini, 2007). Deficits in episodic memory with increasing age lead to schema-consistent recollections that can be explained by reconstructive theories of memory (Bartlett, 1932; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) as well as by fuzzy-trace theory (FTT; Brainerd & Reyna, 2001, 2005). In terms of FTT, two types of traces are established in parallel but independently of one another. Verbatim representations store surface features and details of an event, whereas gist representations capture general, thematic information of an experienced event. Access to verbatim information increases memory recall and accuracy (while suppressing memory errors, including false recollections). Because gist traces lack precise information, they promote less accuracy as well as gist-consistent inaccuracies. Thus, regarding older adults, they tend to encode episodes less elaborately, which in turn limits the storage of veridical information. These two factors contribute to older adults’ overreliance on gist; because memory is assisted by both verbatim and gist traces, greater dependence on gist by older adults produces more errors in memory than younger adults. In addition to these limitations on remembering, although older adults may be able to recall certain aspects of an event, they struggle with the process of combining relevant pieces of a memory experience, such as people involved and the time of the event (Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008). This merging of different elements that belong together has been termed binding by Chalfonte and Johnson (1996). These authors studied whether age-related differences in memory result from a lack of binding, difficulty remembering specific features of complex events, or both. They reported that older adults had greater difficulty in binding (no matter the type of feature, i.e., location, color, item) compared with younger adults. Binding is an essential part of eyewitness memory because it is usually of utmost importance for a jury, legal professionals, police, and/or judges to know information such as time, place, people involved, sounds heard, and type or color of clothing assailants were wearing. If combining features is problematic, a blue shirt may be remembered as red, and two people may be remembered as

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three. All of the issues with episodic memory and binding can have an influence on the way in which older individuals testify and are perceived.

Aging and Eyewitness Memory There is a growing body of literature investigating the eyewitness performance of the older witness. It shows that typically differences between young and old adult witnesses regarding eyewitness memory are seen in both recognition and recall (Adams-Price, 1992; García-Bajos et al., 2012; Karpel, Hoyer, & Toglia, 2001; List, 1986). For instance, Aizpurua et al. (2008) examined age-related differences in eyewitness memory, asking participants to recall as many details as possible after viewing a video of a robbery. Generally, younger adults (M = 19.93 years old) more accurately recalled items than did older adults (M = 62.93 years old), and the number of false alarms during recognition was greater for older adults than for younger adults. However, across different types of content (action items, people items, and detail items), older adults did not differ from younger adults in the number of errors made during recall. The authors concluded that older adults tend to rely more on gist of events instead of actual details and depend on previous knowledge of crimes when completing recognition tasks. By relying on previous knowledge, older adults recognized items that were commonplace in similar criminal events (i.e., robberies) and thus schematic, even if those items were not present in the robbery they were shown in the video. This state of affairs is of course quite consistent with FTT (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005) as described earlier. It is important to note, however, that there also is some evidence showing that even though older adults give fewer details when remembering a crime, they are sometimes no less accurate than are younger adults (cf. Adams-Price, 1992; List, 1986; Yarmey & Kent, 1980). Regarding the notion that older adults are at times equally as accurate as younger adults was investigated by García-Bajos et al. (2012) when they examined the possible effects of script-driven processing on eyewitness memory in both younger (M = 21.98 years) and older (M = 63.72 years) adult participants by presenting participants with crime script that included high- and low-typicality events (i.e., aspects of a robbery). Older adults were as accurate as younger adults when recalling highly typical aspects of events, and there were no recognition differences in young and old participants. However, the elderly displayed a greater proportion of false alarms than did younger participants regardless of level of typicality. For example, regarding what the robbers shouted, a high typicality error was, “This is a stick-up!” while a low typicality error was that the people being robbed were “ordered to shut up.” The authors concluded that compared with younger adults, older participants relied more on gist and plausibility in arriving at their decisions. Again, the conclusion is that older adults often have better memories for gist (general picture) than they do for specific details of an event compared with younger adults.

Impact of Juror Characteristics 367 Because of this reduced reliance on specific details, there is evidence that as a group, older adults provide less complete witness accounts than younger adults and that they seem more prone to source-monitoring mistakes and difficulties binding relevant information. However, “older adults” as a group comprises a large age range that spans, depending on the definition, from 60 or 65 years to the end of life. Thus, there also is considerable variation within this group; for example, young-old adults (commonly defined as 60–74 years) will typically have better memory performance than old-old adults (85 years and up; Mueller-Johnson et al., 2007). There also are sizeable interindividual differences in memory performance among these age groups, in that although older adults as a group may not perform as well as younger adults, a particular older adult may still outperform a particular younger adult.

Witness Credibility and Age Given that older witnesses typically remember the gist of an event, which is both explained and predicted by FTT, does this make them credible and reliable witnesses or does their lack of specificity in memory make them appear to be unreliable and not credible? If older adults are less accurate in recalling details of an event but are just as accurate when recalling the overall event as younger adults, they could still be useful eyewitnesses. Investigators have assessed the perceived credibility of witnesses of various ages (Mueller-Johnson et al., 2007; Ross et al., 1990). Several researchers report that as the age of an eyewitness increases, perceived credibility decreases (Kwong See, Hoffman, & Wood, 2001; Mueller-Johnson, Toglia, Sweeney, O’Connell, 2009). Others have found that the elderly are perceived as equally, if not more, credible than younger adults (Brimacombe, Quinton, Nance, & Garrioch, 1997; MuellerJohnson et al., 2007; Narayan, 2008; Ross et al., 1990; Yarmey, 1984). In part, this discrepancy in findings may be related to how the term credibility is being defined. Credibility is in part related to perceived accuracy of what the witness says but also is related to perceived truthfulness of a witness. Thus, credibility can be viewed as being multidimensional, a perspective that we take later in this chapter. Furthermore, the difference in findings may be due to different characteristics of the witness (e.g., sex, presentation format) employed in the studies. For instance, studies concerning female witnesses have documented lower ratings of credibility. Among these studies is that of Kwong See et al. (2001). Here, the testimony of an 82-year-old female witness was viewed as less accurate and believable than that of a younger female (aged 28 years), and the older witness was also rated as less competent. Sex differences in perceived credibility among older adults also were found by Mueller-Johnson et al. (2009). These authors presented photos of different aged witnesses (ages 69, 79, and 89 years) and asked participants to rate each witness’ credibility. The older the eyewitness, the lower the credibility ratings, but these results were found mainly for the female older witnesses. Older females were rated less positively than older males on most dimensions of credibility including accuracy,

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competence, and cognitive functioning. Sex differences tend to remain despite the type of information presented (either a photo alone or a photo presented along with a witness’ statement via a court transcript). Another explanation for discrepancies in findings also may be the presentation format of the stimuli. Different presentation formats may accentuate different aspects of the witness. Comparing a condition that provided written witness statements together with a photo to mock jurors with one in which only a photo of a witness was provided, Mueller-Johnson et al. (2009) found that older witnesses were regarded as less credible when only a photo was provided but a transcript was not included. It is likely that when photos were presented alone, judgments tended to be more stereotypically driven than when photos were in the presence of relevant information in a transcript. These findings are in line with other research on physiognomic cues of old age and activation of aging stereotypes (e.g., Hummert et al., 1997), which has shown that physiognomic characteristics like wrinkles or drooping facial features are related to being perceived as less capable. Credibility may be defined by multiple dimensions, including witness competence, confidence, convincingness, accuracy, honesty, witness’ observation of the event, memory for the event, witness’ level of cognitive functioning, and witness suggestibility. Mueller-Johnson et al. (2007), in defining credibility along these dimensions, presented detailed trial transcripts (not summaries) that included testimony of a sole eyewitness as well as a cross-examination and direct examination of the witness to participants. The case involved a child pedestrian–car accident wherein a defendant was charged with manslaughter. The eyewitness, described as 49, 69, 79, or 89 years of age, testified that the child hit his head on a rock upon stepping off the curb before being struck by the defendant’s vehicle. Young adult participants rated the 49-year-old and 69-year-old male and female witnesses similarly. However, the 79-year-old male witness was rated as more credible (i.e., convincing, accurate, honest, and confident) than the younger 49-year-old male witness. The 89-year-old male witness was rated as more accurate, confident, and convincing compared with the 49-year-old male. All older adult witnesses were rated as more honest than younger adult witnesses. When older participants (mean age of approximately 75 years) served in a replication of the Mueller-Johnson et al. (2007) study, the results were not different. That is, the elderly participants perceived older witnesses in the same manner as did younger participants (Mueller-Johnson et al., 2009). Brimacombe et al. (1997) presented various testimonies of different-aged witnesses that differed also in testimonial quality. Participants read the testimony of a 20-year-old or 70-year-old that was low, medium, or high in terms of credibility in order to determine if credibility ratings were influenced by age alone. Participants rated witnesses’ credibility after reading the testimonies, and as a result, those in the high-credibility conditions rated both the young and old witness as more credible than those in the low-credibility conditions. Furthermore, the credibility ratings did not differ as a function of age.

Impact of Juror Characteristics 369 In her 2008 study, Narayan found that the elderly are not always viewed negatively. She asked young adult participants (M = 20.77 years) to complete an assessment of attitudes toward elders (i.e., Aging Semantic Differential). She found that overall, younger adults did not view the elderly negatively and that older adults were even viewed more positively than younger adults on measures such as kindness, thoughtfulness, trustworthiness, and safety. Likewise, Cuddy and Fiske (2002), as alluded to above, concluded that the elderly are generally categorized as warm and kind but also are stereotyped as being incompetent. Such findings contradict those in which old age has a negative influence on witnesses’ perceived credibility (e.g., Kwong See et al., 2001; Mueller-Johnson et al., 2009). Even within research studies, differences in perceived credibility have been found across experiments. In Experiment 1 of Ross et al.’s 1990 study, participants watched one of three versions of a simulated court trial in which the only difference was the age of the prosecution’s key witness (8, 21, or 74 years). In Experiment 2, participants read a trial transcript that included the same information that was viewed by participants in the first experiment. In Experiment 3, participants were not exposed to trial transcripts but were asked to imagine a 6-, 8-, 21-, or 74-year-old witness and rate each witness’s “hypothetical witness accuracy, susceptibility to misleading or suggestive questions, honesty, and how much weight they would give to the testimony of a witness of that age” (p. 15). In Experiments 1 and 2, older adults were perceived as more honest and trustworthy and as accurate as younger adults. In Experiment 3, the older witness was still regarded as more honest than the younger adult, but in contrast to the findings in Experiments 1 and 2, the 74-year-old witness was perceived as less credible than the younger adult. In summarizing the results of previous research, it is apparent that stereotypes regarding the elderly have had an influence on their perceived credibility (Mueller-Johnson et al., 2007) and that different information types (a photo presented alone vs. a photo presented simultaneously with a transcript) have influenced the relationship between age and perceived credibility (MuellerJohnson et al., 2009). Because stereotypes may play such a pivotal role, it is imperative to define what a stereotype is, explain how one is activated, and identify individual differences in their usage.

Stereotypes and Their Use in Making Social Judgments Bodenhausen and Richeson (2010) defined a stereotype as “a generalized belief about the characteristics of a group” (p. 345). Stereotyping occurs when particular individuals are believed to possess such generalized characteristics simply because they belong to a certain group. For example, the elderly have been stereotyped as honest yet incompetent (Cuddy & Fiske, 2009; Mueller-Johnson et al., 2007). Stereotyping is somewhat automatic and unavoidable, and it has been argued that even the most egalitarian individuals cannot avoid stereotypic beliefs that are initiated automatically (P. G. Devine, 1989).

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However, depth of processing is believed to reduce the impact of automatic associations (e.g., stereotype beliefs) in making social judgments (Florack & Scarabis, 2001). Deeper processing implies a greater emphasis on encoding the semantic features of an event. Craik and Lockhart (1972) in their seminal paper explained that this “greater emphasis” refers to how much one expands his or her thinking after encountering stimuli. The amount and depth of processing is different across individuals, mainly because the motivation to engage in automatic or deliberate processing differs across people (Bodenhausen & Richeson, 2010). Thus, some individuals are able to “rein in” their stereotypic beliefs and keep them under control when making judgments about individuals from a certain stereotyped group. Differences in the motivation to engage in effortful thinking have been found between individuals with high and low NFC. We turn next to addressing this personality characteristic. Need for Cognition Although differences in the NFC were first recognized by Cohen, Stotland, and Wolfe (1955), Cacioppo and Petty (1982) more fully defined the NFC as an individual’s desire to spend time engaging in arduous thinking or solving complex problems. One’s NFC captures the motivation for thinking rather than an actual ability to make decisions, think effortfully, or solve complex problems (see Petty et al., 2009, for a review). Individuals with a high NFC are those who generally desire spending copious amounts of time thinking, making decisions, solving complex problems, and engaging in more complex tasks. Persons with a low NFC tend to avoid arduous thinking, prefer taking little time to make decisions or judgments, and are not interested in solving complex problems. Differences in the NFC have been found to moderate the relationship between automatic associations and social judgments (Florack & Scarabis, 2001). Social judgments and automatic associations were positively correlated among low-NFC individuals more so than among those who have high NFC. Overall, it seems as though high-NFC individuals’ behavior is influenced more by individuating information, whereas low-NFC individuals base social judgments on stereotypes (Florack & Scarabis, 2001). Researchers have similarly found that low-NFC individuals are more likely than high-NFC individuals to rely on heuristics (i.e., oversimplified decision among devices) when asked to make consumer-related and social–cognitive judgments (e.g., Haugtvedt, Petty, & Cacioppo, 1992; Perlini & Hansen, 2001). Because individuals with a low NFC prefer to think in effortless ways, they therefore rely on simple heuristics (e.g., age-related stereotypes) to make decisions. Critical to this chapter, these individuals are likely to base decisions about witness credibility on the age of the witness. Individuals with a high NFC prefer to think in effortful ways and therefore rely on elaboration (e.g., scrutiny of information) to make decisions. These individuals are likely to base decisions about witness credibility on the cogency of a witness’s testimony.

Impact of Juror Characteristics 371 In a recent exploratory study we examined this connection between NFC and perceived credibility. Because there are stereotypes attributed to the elderly and different types of age information have effects on perceived credibility, it was predicted that NFC would moderate the relationship between age as well as information type (testimony alone, testimony plus witness photo) on perceived credibility of older adult witnesses. Exploratory Study: Need for Cognition, Witness Age, and Perceived Credibility Based on the Mueller-Johnson et al. (2007) experiment, in the following exploratory study, participants read a very detailed trial transcript about a child pedestrian–car accident wherein a defendant was charged with manslaughter. The case rested on whether the child had died due to head injury as a result of the impact with the defendant’s vehicle or from hitting his head on a rock before being struck by the vehicle. The sole witness in the case testified that the child, on stepping off of the street curb, slipped and fell before being hit by the defendant’s vehicle and that the defendant had not appeared to be speeding. He testified that the incident occurred in the early evening hours at dusk and described the weather on the day of the incident as being very wet, rainy, cloudy, and dismal. All transcripts contained the direct and cross-examination of the eyewitness who was described as either a 49- or 79-year-old male; half the transcripts were accompanied by a photo of the 49- or 79-year-old witness. After reading the transcripts, participants were asked to rate the witness’ credibility. A nine-item credibility questionnaire was administered; the items reflected nine different dimensions of credibility and were as follows: the convincingness of the witness’ statement; witness’ competence; accuracy of the statement; witness’ confidence; witness’ honesty; witness’ observation for the event; memory for the incident; witness’ suggestibility during cross-examination; and lastly the witness’ level of cognitive functioning. Overall, perceived credibility was not affected by age or information type (transcript only vs. transcript plus photo) alone but instead was influenced interactively with age, information type, and NFC. The finding that there were no age differences in perceived credibility, although somewhat surprising, is consistent with the past research discussed earlier in that older adults are perceived as more credible than younger adults, especially if they are male (Brimacombe et al., 1997; Mueller-Johnson et al., 2007; Narayan, 2008; Ross et al., 1990; Yarmey, 1984). Yet at other times they are seen as less credible than younger adults (Kwong See et al., 2001; Mueller-Johnson et al., 2009; Ross et al., 1990). However, when differences in credibility ratings have been observed, they are often found for some dimensions of credibility but not all. For example, Mueller-Johnson et al. (2007) found that older adults (69–89 years) were rated as more competent, accurate, and honest (favorable views) but also as more suggestible (unfavorable view) than younger adults. The lack

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of an age effect may be attributed to the fact that the testimony was identical across conditions, with transcript content trumping age of the witness. Additionally, there was no overall effect of information type (testimony with a photo or not) on perceived credibility. These findings also were unexpected because they do not match results from studies wherein perceived credibility of older adults was influenced by the manner in which age information was presented (Mueller-Johnson et al., 2009). Importantly, the influence of age as well as information type on perceived credibility differed as a function of NFC. When considered separately, age and information type had little impact on perceived credibility, but both were influential when NFC was taken into consideration. In this way, NFC may be at least one factor that could disentangle the mixed results in the literature. It is apparent that persons with high or low NFC were influenced, just in different ways, by age and information type. Because the age information provided was likely more salient in the photo conditions, the picture of the eyewitness may have drawn attention to the age stated in the transcripts. Therefore, high-NFC individuals apparently used both stereotype information and relevant information in the transcript, whereas those with low NFC may have relied more heavily on the stereotypic information and less on the relevant case testimony. This conclusion is somewhat different than what we expected on the basis of our original hypothesis. Nevertheless, these findings are consistent with those showing that low-NFC individuals’ judgments are based more on heuristics (i.e., superficial processing), whereas high-NFC individuals’ judgments are affected more by elaboration (i.e., systematic processing). Individual differences in the use of stereotypes in evaluating testimonial information may have been what was missing from the literature all along. In fact, the extant literature on NFC does not provide an empirical base for the outcome we found. It seems that low-NFC individuals relied on the stereotypic information driven by the age of the witness when judging perceived credibility. When looking at the conditions in which the witness was described as a 49-year-old male, those with low NFC rated the witness as more credible in the photoplus-transcript condition than those in the transcript-only condition, probably because age information was more salient in the photo condition. When lowNFC individuals viewed the transcript and the photo together, their judgments driven by stereotypic beliefs may have been exaggerated to some degree. Particularly when a photo of the eyewitness was presented, the 79-year-old witness was rated as less credible by low-NFC individuals, suggesting again that stereotypic information was heavily relied on by low-NFC individuals in this condition (i.e., when the age of the witness was more noticeable, credibility ratings differed). As researchers have found, low-NFC individuals are more accepting of using stereotypes and make judgments based on external cues, such as the age of an eyewitness (Carter, Hall, Carney, & Rosip, 2006; Haugtvedt et al., 1992; Perlini & Hansen, 2001). As predicted, high-NFC participants’ ratings of witnesses’ credibility did not differ across information type or age conditions. These individuals were not

Impact of Juror Characteristics 373 influenced by cues associated with stereotypes, in this case witness age. Does age matter to these individuals at all even though their judgments appear to be influenced strictly by relevant information obtained in the transcripts? Crawford and Skowronski (1998) found that high-NFC individuals have greater memory for stereotype information even though their judgments were unaffected by stereotypes. High-NFC persons in this pilot study may have used both age and witness testimony when rating the witnesses’ credibility. Perhaps these individuals do hold stereotypic beliefs about the elderly but primarily used the transcript information in making judgments. Thus, they seem to seek out information beyond that which is stereotypical in making witness credibility judgments. This interpretation is consistent with previous research in which individuals high in NFC have been shown to seek out more information than those with low NFC (Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996). When jurors’ perceptions of older eyewitnesses are examined, the relationship between perceived credibility and verdicts are typically examined as well because it is reasonable to believe that credible witnesses influence jurors’ decisions of guilt. Shermer, Rose, and Hoffman (2011), found that witness credibility impacted verdicts and that jurors continued to rely on witness credibility even when other evidence (i.e., DNA evidence) was provided. We therefore found it important to determine whether this relationship was impacted by jurors’ NFC. As predicted, high-NFC participants chose a verdict of guilty less often than did those with low NFC because the witness was testifying for the defense, and the transcript was written in such a way that the witness gave relatively “very good” testimony. It seems as though these individuals favored relevant transcript information over stereotypic information. Low-NFC participants rendered more guilty verdicts when seeing a photo of the elderly witness compared with those who only read the transcript. As discussed above, stereotypic information was more prominently displayed in the photo conditions, and therefore, these individuals likely relied more on witness age than on relevant transcript information and rendered verdicts in favor of the prosecution. Thus, perceived credibility affected jurors’ decisions of guilt. Later, we revisit the fact that the transcript as written reflected “very good” testimony so that participants may have been less likely to place the blame on the defendant in this case. It would be beneficial if additional research were conducted in order to further explain the relationship between perceived credibility and verdicts. As mentioned above, this study was designed to be exploratory, so factors such as witness sex were not varied. We believe this study can serve to set the stage for further examination of the relationship between perceived credibility and witness age and personality factors that influence it. We believe this is an area of research that could take many directions to further develop and enrich the perceived credibility literature. Such enrichment will come about if it is driven by theory, and in fact, in the following sections we describe multiple directions that we believe could be pursued regarding how jurors’ individual

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differences affect the way in which they perceive elderly witnesses. In addition, we propose a model on which future theory can be developed.

Future Directions Going forward, it would be beneficial to further investigate several issues concerning age and perceived credibility. The relationship between perceived credibility and verdicts is complicated by age (Mueller-Johnson et al., 2007) as well as need for cognition, as shown in the exploratory experiment. Thus, it would be important to know if “deliberation” decisions differ when the witness testifies for the prosecution and if elderly witness testimony quality differed across conditions. Furthermore, in the pilot study we examined perceived credibility globally rather than emphasizing certain dimensions of credibility (e.g., honesty, competence) as in past research (Ross et al., 1990). Older adults have been perceived as more honest yet less competent than younger adults. In the future, it may be beneficial to examine the effects of need for cognition and other potentially impactful personality traits when certain aspects of credibility are accentuated. Additionally, a few researchers have found that when witnesses are perceived as exceptionally confident, even when their testimony contains inconsistencies, they are still perceived as credible witnesses by mock jurors (Brewer & Burke, 2002). Therefore, creating a transcript in which a witness was described as confident, confidently answered questions, and confidently recalled memories of an event while altering the age of the witness would be helpful. In general, testimonial confidence continues to be one that is not well understood throughout the criminal justice system (Cramer et al., 2009). It is known that memory is sometimes affected by how threatened a person may feel in a given situation (Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, 2008). Stereotype threat has been defined by Schmader and Johns (2003) as “the phenomenon whereby individuals perform more poorly on a task when a relevant stereotype or stigmatized social identity is made salient in the performance situation” (p. 440). These authors found that participants who experienced stereotype threat exhibited deficits in their working memory performance. If an older adult witness is aware that they are being stereotyped, they may experience stereotype threat that could, in turn, affect their recall of an event. If mock jurors were made aware of this stereotype threat, they may be more likely to perceive the witness as less credible. In the research reported in this chapter, we explored the role of dispositional differences in the tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful thought. Furthermore, we investigated the extent to which stereotypes were connected to judgments of eyewitness credibility. Cacioppo and Petty (1982) have reasoned that stable differences in the need for cognition are related to preferences for using relatively simple heuristics (e.g., stereotypes) versus using complex in-depth analyses (e.g., critical evaluation of evidence by triers of fact). Consistent with these expectations, low-NFC and high-NFC individuals differ in the

Impact of Juror Characteristics 375 cognitive styles they employ when processing information (for a review of the literature, see Petty et al., 2009). With respect to the role of individual differences in the forensic arena, however, stable variations in the need for cognition are only one of many potential moderators of several relevant processes. Consider first the extent to which the motivation to think rigorously is related to the degree to which people assess the credibility of potential eyewitnesses. Besides chronic differences in the NFC, other personality factors may play a similar role but through different mechanisms, for example, stable individual differences in what has been termed the need for closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). Compared with persons with a low need for closure, persons with a high need for closure tend to “seize” and “freeze.” That is, high need for closure individuals prematurely end their evaluation of relevant information and, having done so, subsequently become very resistant to any information that might otherwise serve to correct their initially shortsighted decisions (see Kruglanski & Fishman, 2009, for a review of the literature). We thus might expect that high need for closure people would quickly seize on stereotype-related cues (e.g., sex, age, race) that are immediately available when seeing others and subsequently ignore other relevant information such as the quality of eyewitness testimony. Other personality factors—need to evaluate (Jarvis & Petty, 1996) or causal uncertainty (Weary & Edwards, 1994)—also may moderate the connection between stereotype-related cues and perceived credibility of eyewitness. Consider next the extent to which the desire for coherence is related to the connection between perceived credibility of eyewitnesses and juror decisions about guilt. Several personality factors may play a similar role (albeit via different mechanisms) in moderating the strength of the eyewitness credibility–juror decisions linkage, including habitual differences in the preference for consistency (Cialdini, Trost, & Newsom, 1995). Several researchers have found that these differences are connected to consistency-related phenomena such as cognitive dissonance (e.g., Cialdini et al., 1995; Nail, Misak, & Davis, 2004) and the foot-in-the-door persuasion tactic (e.g., Cialdini et al., 1995; Guadagno, Asher, Demaine, & Cialdini, 2001). In the forensic arena, we might therefore predict that the relationship between attitudes (e.g., perceived eyewitness credibility) and attitude-relevant behavior (e.g., juror decisions of defendant innocence) to be stronger for people with a chronically higher need for consistency than for those with a relatively lower need for consistency. The connection between perceived credibility of eyewitness and juror decisions about defendants’ guilt may be further moderated by other personality factors such as authoritarianism/ dogmatism (Duckitt, 2009) or belief in a just world (Dalbert, 2009). Indeed, some personality variables may moderate both the connection between stereotype-related information and eyewitness credibility as well as the connection between perceived eyewitness credibility and juror decisions, a point we address in the next section. In short, there is much theoretical and empirical work that needs to be done to fully appreciate the role of personality factors in not only the stereotype-credibility/juror verdict connection but also in other facets of the judicial and legal process (e.g., juror deliberations).

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A Model for Future Research Figure 15.1 displays a proposed eyewitness credibility model that is the result of years of previous research on stereotypes, the influence stereotypes have on witnesses’ perceived credibility, and in turn the relationship between perceived credibility and jurors’ decisions, namely verdicts. Stereotype use impacts how witnesses are perceived and how perceived credibility influences jurors’ decisions. All of these relationships are displayed within the model. The model also can be used to test whether individual differences, such as personality traits (e.g., need for cognition, need for closure), and person characteristics such as age, sex, and/or level of legal expertise, serve as moderator variables. The model is tentative and as a result of future research will likely be subject to modification. For example, the unidirectional relationship between perceived credibility and juror decisions may in fact be of a bidirectional nature, and therefore the model would need to reflect such changes. Adjustments could also take the form of additional moderator variables. For example, the age of the juror might relate to stereotype activation. We did not include juror age in our model in part because need for cognition is an enduring trait. Also, the age of jurors does not seem to be related to the effects of age on the perceived credibility of witnesses. It is important to emphasize that our model is designed to capture the complexities of perceived credibility of witnesses. A subset of this model is devoted to jury decisions and verdicts as they relate broadly to issues of credibility. Thus, we are not proposing a framework that in any way is a competing model

Figure 15.1 Model Explaining Perceived Credibility of Older Eyewitness.

Impact of Juror Characteristics 377 of jury decision making (JDM). There is a rich literature on JDM research and/or modeling; for a historical progression, consult Pennington and Hastie (1993); D. J. Devine, Clayton, Dunford, Seying, and Pryce (2000); Levett, Danielse, Kovera, and Cutler (2005). and Kassin and Kovera (2012). A variety of JMD models have been proposed (see Winter & Greene, 2007, for a recent review) including mathematical-based and explanation-based models. We believe the story model fits best with the themes of this chapter. Categorized as explanation-based (cognitive), the story model was advanced by Pennington and Hastie (1981, 1992, 1993) some 20 to 30 years ago. They proposed that as a trial progresses, jurors construct a story, a narrative of sorts, based on the facts and witness testimony given in court as well as their life experiences and beliefs. Importantly, the story is retained in memory, not the evidence per se. Although a considerable amount of data has been marshaled to support a narrative model, disagreements also have been registered (e.g., Wiener, Richmond, Seib, Rauch, & Hackney, 2002). In a first stage, jurors develop a narrative as they listen to and assess evidence. A second stage occurs when jurors are instructed about the verdicts they are to consider. The model’s third and final stage is decision making based, as jurors arrive at a verdict that seems to best mesh with the story they have assembled. In sum, the story model suggests jurors weigh and sort through the evidence and testimony to construct a coherent storyline on which they draw conclusions regarding guilt. However, people (jurors) vary in how they sort through evidence, a point that brings us back to NFC. In general then, to the extent that arriving at an appropriate juror decision requires a careful weighing of all relevant evidence, high-NFC jurors would be preferable to their low-NFC counterparts. More specifically, NFC likely influences story construction, though we are unaware of any studies that address this question. Specifically, we suspect that differences in NFC may impact the kinds of stories jurors develop over the course of a trial. An empirical question that immediately comes to mind is how detailed one’s story is. As just noted, high-NFC persons would be predicted to assemble the “data” (facts, evidence) more carefully in telling a more detailed story compared with low-NFC individuals. Whether greater detail in story development produces more “accurate” verdicts is an interesting empirical question that has yet, to our knowledge, to be investigated. Note that this question is in fact one that is generated by the perceived credibility model we have proposed. The role of individual differences in jurors’ need for cognition might be quite complex. For example, whether high-NFC jurors would be more inclined than low-NFC jurors to acquit would depend on the evidence. If the preponderance of evidence favored acquittal, then high NFCs would be more likely than their low-NFC counterparts to acquit. If instead the preponderance of evidence favored conviction, then high NFCs would be more likely than low NFC to vote guilty. In cases where the evidence was mixed, low NFCs ought to be more likely than high NFCs to base their decisions (either acquittal or guilt) on “superficial cues” such as witness age.

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Conclusion Regarding the exploratory study, we have suggested it is important in many ways, but the findings are perhaps most useful and applicable within legal systems similar to that of the United States. The broader message is that it is important that we know how possible jurors perceive older eyewitnesses because older individuals are increasingly likely to become witnesses to or victims of crimes. With this in mind, issues surrounding NFC, as well as other personality characteristics, and its influence on perceived credibility ratings are of great importance. Those working within the legal system may benefit from knowing the potential differences that may exist within a jury. Though beyond the scope of this chapter, such knowledge might play a role in scientific jury selection (Lieberman & Sales, 2006). Also, the way in which an older adult witness is viewed and treated before he or she enters court is influential because prior to testifying in court, witnesses usually encounter police officers, lawyers, and other individuals tied to the case. If older witnesses are perceived as less credible because of their age outside of court, such as when police officers reported that they thought of older witnesses as unreliable (Wright & Holliday, 2005), then they may never get a chance to share their testimony. If older witnesses become aware of such beliefs from those they come into contact with before going into court, this could affect the way in which they testify, a topic we have broached often in this chapter. Moreover, if elderly witnesses’ testimonies are affected in such ways, attorneys may be inclined to use this against them during cross-examination (i.e., discredit and call into question their testimonies). Furthermore, a point well made in recent years by Cramer et al. (2009) is that little is known about juror differences and the role they play in jurors’ decisions about elderly witness credibility and decisions of guilt. Although Cramer and colleagues were interested in the perceived credibility of expert witnesses, they made it clear that perceptions of credibility are not fully understood unless individual differences that influence decisions of credibility are examined. Demonstrating a link between juror differences and perceived credibility of older eyewitnesses, as in the exploratory study, is a step in the direction of creating a more comprehensive foundation for the relationship between age and perceived credibility. Furthermore, knowing “who is the jury” may someday provide a window into their ability to impartially evaluate testimony. For this chapter, testimonial credibility may hinge on personality traits that skew jurors’ assessment of the evidence. We trust that greater awareness of the relationship between age and perceived credibility will lead to improvements in our judicial system. Although it is unfortunate that the way in which witnesses are judged is at times based on their age, it is also unfortunate that some jurors, at least mock jurors, base credibility on factors other than relevant case information, “good testimony,” and case evidence (Cramer et al., 2009). It is our hope that both our review and the findings of our preliminary study will lead others to a greater awareness

Impact of Juror Characteristics 379 and appreciation of how witness age may impact the judicial system. Such understanding may serve as a motivator for all parties in the judicial system, for example, police, judges, and attorneys, to be more keenly aware of the age of witnesses and individual differences of jurors.

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Index

Page numbers in italic format indicate figures and tables. 1988 Criminal Justice Act 344 1991 Criminal Justice Act 344 1999 Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 345, 351 absolute accuracy 173, 174 adolescents 93–4, 141, 153 adult life span 71–3, 83, 84 adversarial system of justice 343, 344, 354 age differences: in event information recognition 217–18; face recognition and 69–71, 79, 81; in illusory recollection 200–1; lineup procedure and 86; lineup tasks and 67–8; for misinformation effect 42–3, 53–4 age effect: elderly eyewitness and 15–17; facial identification and 118–19; false identifications and 24 ageism: eyewitnesses credibility and 181, 337; stereotype assimilation and 59–60 aging: domain-general models of 309–14, 327–8; eyewitness memory and 366–7; false memory and 143–53; information processing and 4–5; memory performance and 4, 38–9, 121, 272; witness credibility and 367–9 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) 155–6 Alzheimer-type dementia 340 American Bar Association (ABA) 354 American Psychological Association (APA) 342 Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) 354 anxiety 249, 273, 341 archival data 121

associative deficit hypothesis 78, 80, 94, 112, 123, 317 associative deficits: implications of 205–6; memory accuracy and 195–6; in older adults 193–204 associative recognition 23, 78, 79, 317 automatic associations 370 Bartlett test 78 biased lineup instructions 125 binding deficit 315–17, 365–6 biological predisposing factors 272–3 blocked presentation 151, 156 Cambridge tests 86 change of appearance 23–4 children: face recognition by 108; identification accuracy and 93–4; as witnesses 239, 254, 355, 356 circadian rhythm 26, 128–9 coded variables 44 cognitive aging see aging cognitive decline 130, 171, 175, 290, 328 cognitive functioning: of elderly eyewitnesses 168; processing speed perspective and 169; sensory function and 309; variability in 308 Cognitive Interview: improving witness performance by 122–3, 178, 226, 322; for investigative interviews 266–7, 270; for recalling criminal events 211; versus structured interview 55; testing effectiveness of 213; use of 58–9 cognitive permeation hypothesis 310 commissioner, taking evidence by 352 communication issues: elderly eyewitnesses and 292–3, 297, 303; intermediaries and 346; interrogator

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and 30; patronizing behavior and 57; witness credibility and 291–4 confidence about memories 234–9 confidence-accuracy relationship 18–19, 24–5, 30–1, 223 confidence judgments 175, 325, 326 “conjunction” lures 77–8, 83 conjunctive memory errors 195–6 context conditions 202, 203, 204 context memory 192, 193, 194, 197 context reinstatement procedure 26, 123–5, 268, 270 control process 174–6 court: elderly eyewitness at 337–8, 343–4; intermediaries in 346; United Kingdom case example 344–54; videotaped interviews in 344 criminal event: details of 178–80, 182; exposure duration and 100–2; eyewitness recall of 211–16; presence of a weapon and 99–100; recognition tests and 217; retention interval and 102–3 criminal justice system 30, 97–8, 301, 337–8 critical lures 197–203 cross-examination 241, 336, 343, 345, 348 cross-race effect 11, 19, 104 cued recall: defined 5; misinformation effect and 51–2; retrieval support and 324 deeper processing 370 Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm 144, 152, 197 dementia 340 discrimination accuracy 72, 73 disguise, impact of 105–7 distinctiveness heuristic 56 DNA evidence 93, 167, 297, 373 DRM paradigm 144, 152, 197 dual-process theory 74, 76, 140, 143, 314, 315 dual-task condition 310 earwitnesses, voice lineups and 19–20 effect size: analysis of 44–7; face recognition and 20–2, 24; for false alarms 108; measures of 11–12, 52; misinformation effect and 50–1; for response criterion 109 effortful processes 318, 320, 323 elderly eyewitnesses: accuracy issues 48, 50, 211; age effect and 15–17;

circadian rhythm of 128–9; cognitive functioning of 168; communication style 292–3, 297, 303; conclusion about 355–7, 378–9; credibility issues 371–2, 376–7; current state of the field 294–300; evaluating evidence by 27–30; factors affecting 271–6; future directions related to 300–2; image and reality about 337–8; implications for 205–6; individual differences in 130; inquisitorial system of justice and 355; interviewing 58–9, 276–9; memory strengths and vulnerabilities 339–40; mock jurors and 180–1; need for cognition and 371–3; negative bias against 233; perceptions of 28–30; practice and recommendations for 25–7; practice in other jurisdictions 354–5; preidentification questions for 126; prejudice against 301–2; recruitment of 294–5, 300; research about 341–3; Scottish variations for 351–2; social and affective factors of 340–1; speech patterns of 300, 302; stereotypes 210, 337, 342; support for 343–4, 356; as targets for crimes 337; United Kingdom case example 344–54; way to study 299–300; see also face recognition; facial identification procedures elderly fact-finders 30 encoding and retrieval deficits 317–23 encoding processes 110, 169, 172 encoding specificity 50, 266, 322 episodic memory: context reinstatement and 123; decline in 121, 169, 213, 364–5; description of 168; domain-specific deficit in 314–17, 327–8; enhancing of 169; recollective retrieval and 142; retrieval processes and 172; true memories as 138 errors of omission and commission 172, 240 estimator variables: criminal eventrelated factors and 98–103; identification outcomes and 6; interaction between age and 98; perpetrator-related factors and 103–7; summary of 111–12; versus system variables 97–8, 328; witness-related factors and 107–11 evaluation tests 215 event memory 318, 321–3, 368

Index explicit attitudes 302 exposure duration 100–2 eyewitness account 363, 367 eyewitness accuracy 48, 50, 211 Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement 97 Eyewitness Evidence: A Trainer’s Manual for Law Enforcement 97 eyewitness identifications: accuracy issues 93–4, 176–80; conclusion about 30–1, 111–13; criminal event and 98–103; encoding and retrieval deficits and 319–21; face recognition and 9–12, 20–4, 95–6; introduction to 3–7; measures for 96; perpetrator and 103–7; person identification and 7–9, 12–20; practice and recommendations for 25–7; reliability issues 94–5; research limitations and 24–5; source monitoring and 181; system versus estimator variables and 97–111; witness-related factors and 107–11 eyewitness memory: aging and 366–7; associative deficits and 205–6; confidence and doubt about 235–9; contents evaluation and 219; details of the event and 182; factors influencing 271–6; identification accuracy and 93–4; legal system and 225–6; retention interval and 219–20; weapon’s presence and 99 eyewitness procedures 87–8 eyewitness recall and recognition 5–6, 211–16 eyewitness testimony: analyzing contents of 296; credibility issues 295, 338; as direct evidence 167; of elderly eyewitnesses 29, 289–91; integrative model of 6–7; videotaped 293, 347, 357 face recognition: age differences and 69–71, 79, 81; description of 9–10; dual-process theory and 74, 76; frontal brain damage and 81–2; future research for 85–8; hit rates for 21, 76–7, 177; individual differences in 82–4; lineup identification and 10; memory requirement for 10–11; misinformation effect and 51–2; modified model of 80; OAB and 107–10; old-new tests of 68; phases of 95; recent experiences and 110; results from 20–4; see also false facial recognition

385

facial identification procedures: conclusion about 130–1; factors affecting 121–2; future research for 129–30; introduction to 118; witnesses performance on 118–29 false-alarm rates (FAR): description of 11; discrimination accuracy scores 72; effect size for 18, 21, 22, 24, 108; face recognition and 76–7; for familiarized lures 78, 83; own-age bias in 70; by participant age 70, 72–3 false confessions 247, 253 false facial recognition: adult life span and 71–3; dual-process theory and 74, 76; gist-based 82, 83; own-age bias and 69–71; perceived familiarity and 73–6 false-frame method 76, 170, 171 false identifications 17, 24, 82, 126, 154, 319 false memory: conclusion about 156–7; confidence in 55, 236, 238; decline in 139; description of 138; future directions related to 155–6; FuzzyTrace theory 140–3; in healthy aging 143–53; illusory recollection and 199, 201; implications for the law and 153–5; introduction to 137–8; memory errors 221, 222; in old age 196–9; one-process theories 138–40; reducing rates of 59; variability in 138–43 false-positive identifications: description of 121; feeling of familiarity and 128; lineup procedure and 127, 128; nonbiased lineup instructions and 125; by older witnesses 122 familiarity: description of 170; reliance on 171, 182 “familiarized lures” 77–8, 81, 83 feature-selection explanation 105, 111 feeling-of-knowing judgments (FOKs) 173, 174 female witnesses 367–8 foil identifications 96, 101, 119, 121, 122, 124 forensic interview 246–7 formal court dress, removal of 348–9 free recall: of criminal events 211–16; defined 5; for investigative interviews 268; misinformation effect and 51–2, 237 frontal brain damage 81–2 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 84, 221

386

Index

fusiform face area (FFA) 84–5 Fuzzy-Trace theory 140–3, 154, 157, 221 gestures in aging population 297 gist memory 137, 141, 152, 157, 171 gist reliance 144, 151–2 gist representations 140, 213, 365 Gudjonsson Suggestibility scales (GSS) 242–5 guided memory instructions 123 high need for closure people 375 high-NFC persons 372–4, 377 hit rates (HR): among old participants 71–2; description of 11; discrimination accuracy scores 72; effect size for 22, 23; face recognition and 21, 76–7, 177; own-age bias in 69, 70; in simulation studies 16 holistic processing 78–9, 83, 106 identification accuracy: circadian rhythm and 128–9; delay effects and 16, 103, 122; disguised perpetrator and 105–7; exposure duration and 101–2; eyewitness memory and 93–4; misinformation and 155; ORB and 104–5; retention interval and 102–3; younger adults and 103, 320 identity-confusion/commitment phenomenon 87 illusory recollection 199–204 immediate recall 119, 215, 216 implicit attitudes 302 information processing: aging and 4–5; different levels of 7; memory processes and 5 inhibitory deficit hypothesis 312–14 inquisitorial system of justice 354–5 intermediaries, role of 346 interrogation-related regulatory decline 238 interrogative suggestibility 242–4, 247–8 interviewing: of elderly eyewitnesses 276–9; witness’s perceptions and 28–30; see also Cognitive Interview investigative interviewers: patronizing behavior of 291, 292, 293; skills and features of 269, 277; students as 297; training of 270–1, 276 investigative interviews: best practice 268–9; history and protocol

description 264–8, 277–8; introduction to 263–4; strengths and limitations of 269–71; video recording of 276 JDM model 377 judgment level 6, 28 judgments of learning (JOLs) 173, 174, 183 jurors: credibility judgments and 364; decision making issues 375; need for cognition and 373, 377; stereotype activation by 376; see also mock jurors jury decision making (JDM) model 377 learning and retrieval 173, 174 legal system: elderly eyewitnesses and 181–3, 302–3; eyewitness memory and 225–6; false memory and 153–5; recommendations for 58–60 limited time mechanism 311 lineup procedure: accuracy issues 176–8; age-related deficits and 86; defined 8; identity-confusion/ commitment phenomenon and 87; immediate and delayed 119, 122; memory requirement for 10–11; outcomes of 9; perpetrator-absent 119, 122, 125; perpetrator-present 120–2, 125; person identification from 8–9; photograph 123, 124, 126, 127, 129; practice and experimental 67, 126–7; presentation of 127; psychometric tests for 85–6; results from 13–16; target-absent 95–6, 102, 319–20; target-present 95–6; through videos 120; see also face recognition Live TV links 345, 347 low need for closure people 375 low-NFC persons 372–4, 377 Manson v. Braithwaite (1977) 97, 98 mean age of samples 48, 53 Memorandum of Good Practice for Video Recorded Interviews With Child Witnesses for Criminal Proceedings 264–5 memory: age-related changes in 168–72; cognitive deterioration and 339; confident or doubtful about 234–5, 341; deficiencies 40–1, 53–4; developmental differences in 53; for features versus associations

Index 194; general and older adult 364–6; for lineup identification 10–11; metacognition and 323–7; reliability of 137; retrieval cues for enhancing 106–7; self-efficacy 130, 175, 176; weapon’s presence impact on 99–100 memory abilities 250–2 memory accuracy: associative deficits and 193–6; improving 55; MPI paradigm for 179; repeated questioning and 239–40 memory distrust syndrome 232, 248 memory errors: conjunctive 195–6; omission or commission 172; subjective experience and 220–5 memory performance: aging and 4, 38–9, 121, 272; memory assessment and 213, 225; memory complaints and 250; memory distrust and 249–50; negative feedback about 246; negative stereotypes and 56–7; stress and 274, 340 memory reports: accuracy of 224; confidence in 55; consistency and changes in 240–2, 248; negative feedback and 276; reliability of 137, 154, 155 memory tasks: associative 142; distractions and 170; dual-task condition and 310; episodic 168, 314; poor performance on 40, 41, 193, 222; semantic 142, 168; source monitoring and 222 memory tests: coded variables and 44; misinformation studies and 52; negative feedback about 245; of older adults 237; response confidence and 223; retention interval and 219; of younger adults 241, 243 memory trust and distrust: anxiety and stress and 249; conclusion about 253–5; memory abilities and 250–2; memory performance and 249–50; memory reports and 248; negative feedback and 247; reasons to be doubtful and 252–3; self-esteem and 248–9 mental reinstatement of context 122, 123, 124, 266 metacognition 323–7 metamemory: age-related changes in 172–6; description of 223; level of 6, 28

387

Metamemory in Adulthood Questionnaire (MIA) Task subscale 247 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) 156, 339–40 misinformation effect: description of 39; details of the event and 178–9; discussion about 53–60; event memory and 321–3; eyewitness memory and 235–7; future research for 54–7; introduction to 38–42; meta-analysis of 43–53; methodological variables for 48, 50–2; moderator analyses for 48, 49; in older adults 40, 205, 275, 290; participant age and 41–2; phases of 39–40; studies related to 43–4; summary of 60; time interval and 51 misleading postevent information (MPI) paradigm 178, 179 mistaken eyewitness evidence 93, 167 mock jurors: community members as 301; credibility evaluation by 291–3; elderly eyewitnesses and 180–1; students as 297 mock witnesses: circadian rhythm and 129; facial identification by 118–19; video lineups and 120–1 moderator analyses 48, 49, 52 Modified Cognitive Interview (MCI) 267–8, 322–4 monitoring process 173–4 Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire 129 mug shot bias 155 Narrative Elaboration Technique (NET) 265 National Crime Survey 337 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) interview protocol 265–6 natural aging see aging need for cognition (NFC) 370–3 negative feedback: about memory performance 246; memory distrust and 247; memory reports and 276; response changes following 242–5 negative mood, misinformation effect and 56, 59 Neil v. Biggers (1972) 98 New York City Elder Abuse Training Project 354

388

Index

nonbelieved memories 233, 235 nonbiased lineup instructions 125, 126, 127 ‘No Witness, No Justice’ initiative 349 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) 252 off-topic speech 292, 293 Oklahoma City bombing 316 old age: defined 3; false memory in 196–9; no clear-cut boundaries for 26–7 old-age targets 17–18 older adults: with Alzheimer’s disease 155–6; associative deficits in 193–204; as cooperative witnesses 219; criteria for categorizing 213–14; event information recognition in 216–20; eyewitness testimony of 289–91; identification accuracy and 93–4, 103, 108; memory deficiencies and 40–1; memory test of 237; misinformation effect in 40, 205, 275, 290; own-age bias in 70–1; perceived as negative stereotypes 56–7, 290–1; rejection processes and 152; research on gestures in 297; social pressure on 320; see also elderly eyewitnesses one-process theories 138–40 open-ended questions 211, 212, 265, 268 own-age bias (OAB): face recognition and 69–71, 107–10; in false alarm rates 70; future research for 111; recent experiences and 110; social categorization of people and 110–11 own-age effect 17–18, 22–3 own-race bias (ORB) 104–5 patronizing behavior: effect of 57; by interviewers 291, 292, 293; by police officers 30 PEACE model 266–70 perceptual learning theories 104, 105 perceptual processing 79, 84–6, 252 perpetrator, identification of 118–19, 176–7 perpetrator-related factors 103–7 perpetuating factors 271, 275–6 person identification: from lineups or photo spreads 7–9; results from 12–20 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 120 Positive Psychology movement 342

precipitating factors 271, 273–5 predisposing factors 271–3 prejudice, reducing 301–2 preparation and planning, engage and explain, account, closure, and evaluation (PEACE) model 266–70 principal-component analysis (PCAs) 83 prior statements, admission of 352 processing speed perspective 169, 172, 182, 311, 312 ‘Prosecuting Crimes Against Older People’ Initiative 350–1 psychological precipitating factors 274 psychological predisposing factors 273 psychometric tests 85–6 publication variables 52–3 quality-accuracy profile (QAP) procedure 325, 327 race issues 103–5 random presentation 151, 156 reality-monitoring model 220–1 recall: description of 4; of details of the event 178–9; open-ended questions for 268; perpetuating factors and 275 recognition judgments 74–6, 203 recognition memory see face recognition recognition tests: age differences and 169; criminal event information and 217; DRM paradigm and 197; false memory and 143, 144; forced-choice 198; legal system and 182 recollection deficits 314–15 recollection processes 170, 323 recruitment of elderly witnesses 294–5, 300 rejection processes 152–3 relative accuracy 173, 174 Remember judgments 200, 224, 237 Remember-Know judgments 203, 204, 224 repeated questioning, changes in response across 239–47 response changes: across repeated questioning 239–40; following negative feedback 242–4; following social pressure 244–6; in forensic interview 246–7 response confidence 223 response criterion 11, 95, 108–9, 219, 325 restorative justice (RJ) 350, 354

Index retention interval: description of 102; effect size and 108–9; eyewitness memory and 219–20; identification accuracy and 16, 102–3 retrieval processes 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 318 retrieval support 324 Rivermead Behavioral Memory Test 342 sample variables 48 schema-consistent recollections 365 script-driven processing 94, 100, 106, 210, 214, 366 self-esteem, memory distrust and 248–9 “self-initiated processing” 318 semantic memories 168, 213, 214, 339, 364 sensory deficit hypothesis 309–10 shallow encoding 317–18, 320, 321 Shift score 243, 244 signal detection theory 11, 71, 73, 109, 218 simulation studies: analyzing testimony from 296; hit rates in 16; person identification in 24; related to jury 298–9 simultaneity mechanism 311–12 social judgments 369–74 social precipitating factors 274–5 social predisposing factors 273 social pressure 244–6, 320 source errors 179, 254 source memory 171, 224, 272 source monitoring 40–1, 53–4, 181, 222–3, 316, 322 source-recollection hypothesis 94, 102 Speaking Up for Justice report 344 speech patterns of elderly witnesses 300, 302 speed of processing model 311–12 State of New Jersey v. Cromedy (1999) 104 State of New Jersey v. Henderson (2011) 98 State of Oregon v. Lawson (2012) 98 Step-Wise Guidelines 264 stereotype assimilation 56–7, 59–60 stereotypes: defined 369; older adults perceived as 56–7, 290–1; social judgments and 369–74 stereotype threat 56–7, 374 stress 48, 50, 215, 249, 273–4, 340–1 structured interview 55

389

studied items 197–202 subjective experience 220–5, 314 supporter’s role 352–3 system variables: versus estimator variables 97–8; eyewitness identifications and 94–5; witness performance and 122–9 Total Suggestibility score 243, 244 trait memory distrust 250, 251 trial transcripts 296, 297, 368, 369, 371 true memory: decline in 138, 139, 144; effects of healthy aging on 145–50; as episodic memory 138 unconscious transference 182, 222 United Kingdom case example 344–54 United States v. Norwood (1996) 104 United States v. Ramirez-Rodriguez (1977) 167 United States v. Smith (1984) 104 United States v. Stevens (1984) 104 unusualness hypothesis 99 verbal fluency 4, 5, 300 verbatim memory 137, 138, 141, 142, 152, 171 verbatim representations 140, 365 verdicts 299, 373, 374, 376, 377 Victim Personal Statements 349 victims and witnesses, providing protection for 344–5 video lineups 120–1, 129, 130 videotaped interviews 344 video testimony 347 virtual environment, memory assessment in 196 visual and auditory acuity 171, 272, 277, 309 voice lineups, earwitnesses and 19–20 War of the Ghosts, The 139 weapon focus effect 99–100, 215 Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) 295 wildcard, the 127 Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) 312 Witness Charter 343, 349–50 witness credibility: age and 367–9; methodological issues in 297–9; mock jurors and 180–1; perceived confidence and 233, 343, 364;

390

Index

stereotype and communication style and 291–4 witness-related factors 107–11 working memory 170, 172, 312–14 World Health Organization 363 wrongful convictions 8, 9, 93, 167 Yield-1 score 243, 250 Yield-2 score 243, 250

younger adults: event information recognition in 216–20; face recognition and 68; hit rate advantage for 72; identification accuracy and 103, 320; memory test of 241, 243; misinformation effect and 53–4; own-age bias in 70–1; see also false memory; memory