The effect of exposure to multiple lineups on face identification accuracy

This study examines the conditions under which an intervening lineup affect s identification accuracy on a subsequent lineup. One hundred and sixty adu lts observed a photograph of one target individual for 60 s. One week later they viewed an intervening target-absent lineup and were asked to identify the target individual. Two days later, participants were shown one of thre e 6-person lineups that included a different photograph of the target face (present or absent), a foil face from the intervening lineup (present or ab sent), plus additional foil faces. The hit rate was higher when the foil fa ce from the intervening lineup was absent from the test lineup and the fals e alarm rate was greater when the target face was absent from the test line up. The results suggest that simply being exposed to an innocent suspect in an intervening lineup, whether that innocent suspect is identified by the witness or not, increases the probability of misidentifying the innocent su spect and decreases the probability of correctly identifying the true perpe trator in a subsequent test lineup. The implications of these findings both for police lineup procedures and for the interpretation of lineup results in the courtroom are discussed.