Travis M Seale-Carlisle

University of Aberdeen | ABDN · School of Psychology

Objectives: When someone is arrested and charged with a crime, they may be released on bail or required to participate in a community supervision program while awaiting trial. These 'pre-trial programs' are common throughout the United States, but very little research has demonstrated their effectiveness. Researchers have qualified these findings b...

pyWitness is a python toolkit for recognition memory experiments, with a focus on eyewitness identification (ID) data analysis and model fitting. The current practice is for researchers to use different statistical packages to analyze a single dataset. pyWitness streamlines the process of the data analysis. In addition to conducting key data analys...

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...

Eyewitness identifications play a key role in the justice system, but eyewitnesses can make errors, often with profound consequences. We used findings from basic science and innovative technologies to develop and test whether a novel interactive lineup procedure, wherein witnesses can rotate and dynamically view the lineup faces from different angl...

This paper uses machine-learning techniques to examine people’s use of verbal expressions of confidence. Across the field of academic psychology, it is often assumed that such statements reflect the same underlying information as numeric confidence ratings. We show that verbal confidence is not redundant with numeric confidence, but instead contrib...

Children are frequently witnesses of crime. In the witness literature and legal systems, children are often deemed to have unreliable memories. Yet, in the basic developmental literature, young children can monitor their memory. To address these contradictory conclusions, we reanalyzed the confidence-accuracy relationship in basic and applied resea...

We examined how encoding view influences the information that is stored in and retrieved from memory during an eyewitness identification task. Participants watched a mock crime and we varied the angle from which they viewed the perpetrator. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 2904) were tested with a static photo lineup; the viewing angle of the lin...

Significance Eyewitness misidentifications have contributed to many wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA evidence. In response, many useful reforms have been introduced to protect the innocent. However, some police practices designed to protect the innocent also protect the guilty. We investigated a method for selecting fillers in a police...

What explains the puzzle of life without parole (LWOP) sentencing in the United States? In the past two decades, LWOP sentences have reached record highs, with over 50,000 prisoners serving LWOP. Yet during this same period, homicide rates have steadily declined. The U.S. Supreme Court has limited the use of juvenile LWOP in Eighth Amendment ruling...

Eyewitness identifications play a key role in the justice system, but eyewitnesses make errors, often with profound consequences. Errors are more likely when the witness is of a different race to the suspect, due to a phenomenon called the Own Race Bias (ORB). ORB is characterized as an encoding-based deficit, but has been predominantly tested usin...

Recently, the field of eyewitness identification has undergone a radical transformation, using signal-detection theory, models, and associated analyses to answer the important applied question of how police should test a witness’s memory of a criminal perpetrator. Here, we used these analytical techniques and the basic science of face memory to exa...

Sleep aids the consolidation of recently acquired memories. Evidence strongly indicates that sleep yields substantial improvements on recognition memory tasks relative to an equivalent period of wake. Despite the known benefits that sleep has on memory, researchers have not yet investigated the impact of sleep on eyewitness identifications. Eyewitn...

Sleep aids the consolidation of recently acquired memories. Evidence strongly indicates that sleep yields substantial improvements on recognition memory tasks relative to an equivalent period of wake. Despite the known benefits that sleep has on memory, researchers have not yet investigated the impact of sleep on eyewitness identifications. Eyewitn...

Children are frequently victims and witnesses of crime. In the witness identification literature, children are deemed to have unreliable memories. Yet, in developmental research, even young children display appropriate metacognitive cues that reflect their accuracy. To address these contradictory findings, we asked children in young- (4–6 years), m...

The criminal justice system should consider the confidence an eyewitness expresses when making an identification at the time the initial lineup procedure is conducted. High confidence expressed at this time typically indicates high accuracy in the identification. Because the suspect identification – not filler identifications or no identifications...

Scientific advances across a range of disciplines hinge on the ability to make inferences about unobservable theoretical entities on the basis of empirical data patterns. Accurate inferences rely on both discovering valid, replicable data patterns and accurately interpreting those patterns in terms of their implications for theoretical constructs....

How can lineups be designed to elicit the best achievable memory performance? One step toward that goal is to compare lineup procedures. In a recent comparison of US and UK lineup procedures, discriminability and reliability was better when memory was tested using the US procedure. However, because there are so many differences between the procedur...

How can lineups be designed to elicit the best achievable memory performance? One step toward that goal is to compare lineup procedures. In a recent comparison of US and UK lineup procedures, discriminability and reliability was better when memory was tested using the US procedure. However, because there are so many differences between the procedur...

Verbally describing a face has been found to impair subsequent recognition of that face from a photo lineup, a phenomenon known as the verbal overshadowing effect (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). Recently, a large direct replication study successfully reproduced that original finding (Alogna et al., 2014). However, in both the original study a...

From the perspective of signal detection theory, different lineup instructions may induce different levels of response bias. If so, then collecting correct and false identification rates across different instructional conditions will trace out the receiver operating characteristic (ROC)—the same ROC that, theoretically, could also be traced out fro...

In the USA and the UK, many thousands of police suspects are identified by eyewitnesses every year. Unfortunately, many of those suspects are innocent, which becomes evident when they are exonerated by DNA testing, often after having been imprisoned for years. It is, therefore, imperative to use identification procedures that best enable eyewitness...

a b s t r a c t Although frequently used with recognition, a few studies have used the Remember/Know procedure with free recall. In each case, participants gave Know judgments to a significant number of recalled items (items that were presumably not remembered on the basis of familiarity). What do these Know judgments mean? We investigated this iss...