More than 25 years of research has accumulated concerning the possible biasing effects of mugshot exposure to eyewitnesses. Two separate metaanalyses were conducted on 32 independent tests of the hypothesis that prior mugshot exposure decreases witness accuracy at a subsequent lineup. Mugshot exposure both significantly decreased proportion correct and increased the false alarm rate, the effect being greater on false alarms. A mugshot commitment effect, arising from the identification of someone in a mugshot, was a substantial moderator of both these effects. Simple retroactive interference, where the target person is not included among mugshots and no one in a mugshot is present in the subsequent lineup, did not significantly impair target identification. A third metaanalysis was conducted on 19 independent tests of the hypothesis that failure of memory for facial source or context results in transference errors. The effect size was more than twice as large for “transference” studies involving mugshot exposure in proximate temporal context with the target than for “bystander” studies with no subsequent mugshot exposure.
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Experimental psychologists have used the term interference to refer to the tendency for one activity to negatively impact memory for another activity. Retroactive interference would reflect a negative impact on memory for material encoded prior to the activity in question.
Deffenbacher et al. (1981) have referred to memory for the target face image(s) per se as item memory and memory for the source or context of encounter with a face as context memory.
Even though the cutoff year for the aforementioned comprehensive metaanalysis project was 2002, the Perfect and Harris (2003) article was included for the limited purpose of conducting the present metaanalysis focused just on mugshot exposure effects. This study is one of three published since 2000 and adds six independent tests to a prior total of 26 tests of the hypothesis that mugshot exposure is detrimental to eyewitness memory accuracy. The initial year for the current narrowly focused metaanalyses was determined by the fact that the first published study of mugshot exposure effects occurred in 1977.
Inasmuch as the power to detect a difference between proportions is not simply a function of the magnitude of the difference, but varies as a function of where a given difference occurs along the scale of differences between zero and one, an arcsin transformation (nonlinear) of these differences has been suggested by Cohen (1988). The statistic h is the resulting transform of a given difference in proportions. For instance, the following pairs of proportions all yield approximate values of h =.20: .05 and .10, .20 and .29, .40 and .50, .60 and .70, .80 and .87, and .90 and .95.
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Deffenbacher, K.A., Bornstein, B.H. & Penrod, S.D. Mugshot Exposure Effects: Retroactive Interference, Mugshot Commitment, Source Confusion, and Unconscious Transference. Law Hum Behav 30, 287–307 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9008-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9008-1