Brent M. King

Date of Award

8-1-2005

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Public Health

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate how alcohol, retention time, and presentation of stimuli lineups impact the rate of correct and incorrect identifications within an eyewitness recognition task. Sixty (60) male participants were divided into 4 different alcohol or placebo conditions. Two of the conditions are such that the participants were blind to what they were being given (alcohol or a placebo fruit drink). The final two conditions were such that the participants were either told falsely that they were receiving alcohol (misled placebo) or truthfully that they were only getting a fruit drink (informed placebo). Participants were shown 6 target photos and 16 filler photos and asked to study them. Subsequently, the participants in each condition were tested for recognition of 2 (per test time for a total of 6) of those target faces at 1 hour post exposure, 6-hrs post exposure, and 24-hrs post exposure. Recognition testing included 4 types of lineups: simultaneous lineups with target present, sequential with target present, simultaneous with target present and sequential with target absent. Results indicated that the alcohol group had overall decreased recognition accuracy due to an increased number of false identifications in the target absent lineups while there were no significant differences between groups in recognition performance for correctly selecting the target when one was present. Results also indicated that the sequential lineup style decreased the number of false identifications made by all groups while there was no impact on correct identification.

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