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Hit and Miss: Is The Sequential Superiority Effect Just A False Alarm?
Hit and Miss: Is The Sequential Superiority Effect Just A False Alarm?
Hit and Miss: Is The Sequential Superiority Effect Just A False Alarm?
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
George Steven Baker/539340
PSYC20007 Cognitive Psychology
Lab 21: Thursday 8 a.m.
Tutor: Mr. Geoffrey Saw
1642 words
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
Abstract
The past few decades have seen much published literature advocating the superiority
of sequential lineup procedures (SEQ) over simultaneous lineup procedures (SIM) for
eyewitness identification (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay, 2001). This study
attempted to replicate findings that SEQ resulted in fewer hits and fewer false alarms
than SIM. After testing 740 cognitive psychology students, no significant evidence of
replication was found. Additionally, a novel lineup procedure was introduced in this
study with the aim of reducing false alarms in culprit-absent lineups. The sequential
presentation-only procedure (SPO) differs from SEQ in that the witness is asked
whether the culprit is present once at the end of the sequence, instead of after each
lineup member. Contrary to the hypothesis, SPO had a false alarm rate significantly
higher than SIM. The results of this study add to scepticism of the sequential
superiority hypothesis (McQuiston-Surret, Malpass, & Tredoux, 2006).
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
does not cause a criterion shift. A novel sequential presentation-only procedure (SPO)
will be tested where a lineup is presented sequentially, but a decision on the presence
or absence of the culprit is not made until the end of the sequence. Making just one
decision each lineup may reduce the propensity to report the culprit absent by
eliminating unpredictable aspects of SEQ, such as how many lineup members will be
present in the sequence. The study hypothesises that SPO will show no reduction in
the hit rate of SIM (thus also achieving a higher hit rate than SEQ), and fewer false
alarms than SIM.
Method
Participants
The participants were 740 PSYC20007 Cognitive Psychology students who
completed the task in groups as part of a laboratory experiment. Students were
randomly assigned to conditions with 270 in the Simultaneous presentation condition,
238 in the Sequential presentation condition and 232 in the Sequential Presentation
Only condition.
Stimuli and Apparatus
Participants were group tested in a computer lab. The experiment was
completed in an Internet browser running an experiment programmed using HTML
and JavaScript. The stimuli were black and white headshots of males taken from
Kayser (1985); each photo was presented on a white background.
Procedure
On each trial, the words Get Ready were presented for 1000 ms followed by
the presentation of a target face (the perpetrator), which was presented for 500 ms and
was immediately backward masked by a scrambled image of that face presented for
1000 ms. The lineup was then presented, and the participants response recorded.
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
SIM condition, followed by SPO, and then SEQ. Additionally, most false alarms
occurred in the SPO condition, followed by SEQ, and then SIM.
Table 1.
Descriptive statistics for the hits and false alarms of the three conditions of suspect
line-ups
Hits
Condition
Mean
Std.
SIM
SEQ
SPO
.8470
.8213
.8348
Deviation
.17242
.19229
.18568
SIM
SEQ
SPO
.1706
.1890
.2414
.17898
.18292
.19580
False alarms
A one-way ANOVA did not show a significant difference in the hit rates
between the procedures, F(2,737) = 1.24, p = .29. However, it did show a significant
difference in the false alarm rates between the groups, F(2,737) = 9.54, p < .001, 2
= .03. This result demonstrates a small to medium effect of line-up procedure on false
alarm, according to Cohen (1988).
For post-hoc analysis, the Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons was
used. The analysis showed a significant difference in the false alarm rate between the
SIM and SPO conditions (Mean Difference = .07, p < .001) and between the SEQ and
SPO conditions (Mean Difference = .05, p = .007), but not between the SIM and SEQ
conditions (Mean Difference = .02, p = .79).
Discussion
This study aimed to replicate previous findings that SEQ produces less hits
and less false alarms than the SIM lineup procedure. It also proposed the novel SPO
and hypothesised this procedure would show no reduction in the SIM hit rate, but
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
References
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.).
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.
Dysart, J. E., & Lindsay, R. C. L. (2001). A pre-identification questioning effect:
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Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
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Hit and miss: Is the sequential superiority effect just a false alarm?
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