Tsao Hsin-Hui, Tseng Philip
Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan.
Psychol Res. 2025 May 2;89(3):97. doi: 10.1007/s00426-025-02124-1.
Eyewitness testimony is widely used in forensic scenarios and plays a crucial role for jurors in convictions. However, in the absence of ground truth for the crime, sometimes it is difficult for investigators to assess the accuracy of a particular eyewitness' testimony. In this study, we investigated whether it is possible to retrospectively assess an eyewitness' memory accuracy for the crime event (which presumably has no ground truth), with another staged mock event (that has ground truth). This possibility hinges upon the assumption that individuals are consistent in their memory performances across different episodic events. To test this assumption, our participants first witnessed a burglary theft on video, and were asked to recall details of the crime 24 h later. After one week, participants witnessed another burglary theft (i.e., the probe event) that were either visually dissimilar (Experiment 1) or highly similar (Experiment 2) as the target crime, and were tested on their memory accuracy 24 h later. In both experiments, we observed significant correlation between memory accuracies of the crime and the probe event, and such correlation seemed to be mostly driven by participants' memory for details that are central to the crime rather than peripheral details. Importantly, Experiment 2 not only replicated findings from Experiment 1, but also showed stronger correlation, suggesting that highly similar probe event may be preferable for field use. These results demonstrate that individual differences, as well as its consistency across multiple events, can be capitalized for eyewitness screening.
目击者证词在法医场景中被广泛使用，对陪审员定罪起着关键作用。然而，在犯罪没有确凿事实依据的情况下，调查人员有时很难评估特定目击者证词的准确性。在本研究中，我们调查了是否有可能通过另一个有确凿事实依据的模拟事件，对犯罪事件（大概没有确凿事实依据）的目击者记忆准确性进行回顾性评估。这种可能性取决于这样一种假设，即个体在不同的情景事件中的记忆表现是一致的。为了验证这一假设，我们的参与者首先观看了一段入室盗窃的视频，并被要求在24小时后回忆犯罪细节。一周后，参与者观看了另一起入室盗窃事件（即探测事件），该事件与目标犯罪在视觉上要么不相似（实验1），要么高度相似（实验2），并在24小时后对他们的记忆准确性进行测试。在两个实验中，我们都观察到犯罪事件和探测事件的记忆准确性之间存在显著相关性，而且这种相关性似乎主要是由参与者对犯罪核心细节而非外围细节的记忆驱动的。重要的是，实验2不仅重复了实验1的结果，而且显示出更强的相关性，这表明高度相似的探测事件可能更适合实际应用。这些结果表明，个体差异及其在多个事件中的一致性可用于目击者筛选。
