Publication Date
2016
Journal or Book Title
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
Abstract
How should the accuracy of eyewitness identification decisions be measured, so that best practices for identification can be determined? This fundamental question is under intense debate. One side advocates for continued use of a traditional measure of identification accuracy, known as the diagnosticity ratio, whereas the other side argues that receiver operating characteristic curves (ROCs) should be used instead because diagnosticity is confounded with response bias. Diagnosticity proponents have offered several criticisms of ROCs, which we show are either false or irrelevant to the assessment of eyewitness accuracy. We also show that, like diagnosticity, Bayesian measures of identification accuracy confound response bias with witnesses’ ability to discriminate guilty from innocent suspects. ROCs are an essential tool for distinguishing memory-based processes from decisional aspects of a response; simulations of different possible identification tasks and response strategies show that they offer important constraints on theory development.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-016-0006-7
Volume
1
License
UMass Amherst Open Access Policy
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Rotello, Caren M. and Chen, Tina, "ROC curve analyses of eyewitness identification decisions: An analysis of the recent debate" (2016). Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. 30.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-016-0006-7