Adele Quigley-McBride

• Ph.D
• Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University

Historically, forensic science results have been admitted in court, with minimal scrutiny regarding their scientific validity. However, following the National Academy of Sciences (NAS, 2009) report, the forensic community has undergone a significant transformation. This shift has demonstrated that forensic scientists and laboratories want to ensure...

Decades of research have explored factors related to eyewitness misidentifications and recommended procedures to maximize identification accuracy. In the current study, we explore whether and how this research has actually been adopted into the formal, written policies of police agencies by evaluating eyewitness identification policies used across...

Experimental psychologists investigating eyewitness memory have periodically gathered their thoughts on a variety of eyewitness memory phenomena. Courts and other stakeholders of eyewitness research rely on the expert opinions reflected in these surveys to make informed decisions. However, the last survey of this sort was published more than twenty...

This research investigates whether police officers can reliably use behavioral cues to determine whether a person is conceal- ing an object. Using a Lens Model framework, we performed a mega-analysis of three experiments. In each study, officers and laypersons judged whether people were concealing an object and reported “articulable behaviors” they...

Objective: Although there are many lab-based studies demonstrating the utility of confidence and decision time as indicators of eyewitness accuracy, there is almost no research on how well these variables function for lineups in the real world. In two experiments, we examined confidence and decision time associated with real lineups that had been...

Across two experimental studies, we investigated the role of information loss, contextual information, and distinctive features of fingerprints on novice’s ability to judge whether two fingerprints came from the same source. Distinctive fingerprints resulted in more accurate decisions. Information loss diminished performance on the comparison task,...

Experimental psychologists investigating eyewitness memory have periodically published “consensus documents” that reflect widely held scientific opinion on eyewitness memory phenomena. The last consensus document that aimed to inform the court was published two decades ago. The science of eyewitness memory has changed considerably since that time a...

General Audience Summary When an eyewitness testifies during a criminal trial, the jurors will typically hear information that can help them assess the eyewitness’s accuracy (e.g., how well the eyewitness could see the perpetrator or how police administered the lineup). Although a confident eyewitness is not necessarily accurate, jurors tend to use...

Preexisting beliefs frame people’s perception and interpretation of new, relevant information. For instance, jurors’ attitudes about mental illness will affect how they evaluate testimony from forensic psychologists and, ultimately, their judgment about the case. Furthermore, because each legal party secures experts that will favor their side, juro...

Full text available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589871X22000018 Forensic analysts often receive information from a multitude of sources. Empirical work clearly demonstrates that biasing information can affect analysts’ decisions, and that the order in which task-relevant information is received impacts decision-making....

Visual comparison—comparing visual stimuli (e.g., fingerprints) side by side and determining whether they originate from the same or different source (i.e., “match”)—is a complex discrimination task involving many cognitive and perceptual processes. Despite the real-world consequences of this task, which is often conducted by forensic scientists, l...

Police routinely give eyewitnesses multiple opportunities to identify the same suspect, and numerous exoneration cases demonstrate that this practice can contribute to wrongful convictions. Empirical research addressing this practice shows it can lead to the repeated-suspect effect, which is a significant increase in suspect identifications after t...

In 2009, the National Research Council (NRC) globally criticized forensic science and, in particular, the potential for contextual bias to increase errors in forensic examination. Nevertheless, very few research-based solutions have been proposed and, of the current recommendations, none are consistently used in practice. Two experiments are presen...

We examined how giving eyewitnesses a weak recognition experience impacts their identification decisions. In 2 experiments we forced a weak recognition experience for lineups by impairing either encoding or retrieval conditions. In Experiment 1 (n = 245), undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to watch either a clear or a degraded culpri...

Health is not only a result of biological conditions, but of psychological, economic, and social circumstances. Both proximal factors, which impact daily life, and distal factors, which are further removed from everyday life, can influence a person’s wellbeing. However, traditionally these distal factors have been overlooked in public discourse and...

The potential role of brief online studies in changing the types of research and theories likely to evolve is examined in the context of earlier changes in theory and methods in social and personality psychology, changes that favored low-difficulty, high-volume studies. An evolutionary metaphor suggests that the current publication environment of s...

When people in laboratory studies sample products in a sequence, they tend to prefer options presented first and last. To what extent do these primacy and recency effects carry over to real-world settings where numerous sources of information determine preferences? To investigate this question, we coded archival data from 136 actual whisky tastings...

Forensic examiners are often exposed to contextual information that can bias their conclusions about evidence samples (e.g., fingerprints, fibers, tool marks). We tested the recently-proposed filler-control method for moderating the biasing effects of contextual information for forensic comparisons. Borrowing from an analogy to eyewitness lineups v...

Psychologists have made attempts to apply psychological knowledge on eyewitness issues to the legal system for over a century. But it was not until the 1990s that an organization of psychological researchers (the American Psychology-Law Society) made concrete recommendations in a white paper concerning eyewitness identification. These recommendatio...

When people make judgments about the truth of a claim, related but nonprobative information rapidly leads them to believe the claim-an effect called "truthiness" [1]. Would the pronounceability of others' names also influence the truthiness of claims attributed to them? We replicated previous work by asking subjects to evaluate people's names on a...