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Receiver operating characteristic analysis of eyewitness memory comparing the diagnostic accuracy of simultaneous vs. sequential lineups..pdf (501.65 kB)

Receiver operating characteristic analysis of eyewitness memory: comparing the diagnostic accuracy of simultaneous versus sequential lineups.

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-02-01, 09:50 authored by Laura Mickes, Heather Flowe, John T. Wixted
A police lineup presents a real-world signal-detection problem because there are two possible states of the world (the suspect is either innocent or guilty), some degree of information about the true state of the world is available (the eyewitness has some degree of memory for the perpetrator), and a decision is made (identifying the suspect or not). A similar state of affairs applies to diagnostic tests in medicine because, in a patient, the disease is either present or absent, a diagnostic test yields some degree of information about the true state of affairs, and a decision is made about the presence or absence of the disease. In medicine, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis is the standard method for assessing diagnostic accuracy. By contrast, in the eyewitness memory literature, this powerful technique has never been used. Instead, researchers have attempted to assess the diagnostic performance of different lineup procedures using methods that cannot identify the better procedure (e.g., by computing a diagnosticity ratio). Here, we describe the basics of ROC analysis, explaining why it is needed and showing how to use it to measure the performance of different lineup procedures. To illustrate the unique advantages of this technique, we also report three ROC experiments that were designed to investigate the diagnostic accuracy of simultaneous vs. sequential lineups. According to our findings, the sequential procedure appears to be inferior to the simultaneous procedure in discriminating between the presence vs. absence of a guilty suspect in a lineup.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

Volume

18

Issue

4

Pages

361 - 376

Citation

MICKES, L., FLOWE, H.D. and WIXTED, J.T., 2012. Receiver operating characteristic analysis of eyewitness memory: comparing the diagnostic accuracy of simultaneous versus sequential lineups. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 18(4), pp. 361-376.

Publisher

© American Psychological Association

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2012

Notes

This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.

ISSN

1076-898X

eISSN

1939-2192

Language

  • en