Erickson, WB, Brown, C orcid.org/0000-0001-9697-4878, Portch, E et al. (9 more authors) (2022) The impact of weapons and unusual objects on the construction of facial composites. Psychology, Crime and Law. ISSN 1068-316X
Abstract
The presence of a weapon in the perpetration of a crime can impede an observer’s ability to describe and/or recognise the person responsible. In the current experiment, we explore whether weapons when present at encoding of a target identity interfere with the construction of a facial composite. Participants encoded an unfamiliar target face seen either on its own or paired with a knife. Encoding duration (10 or 30 s) was also manipulated. The following day, participants recalled the face and constructed a composite of it using a holistic system (EvoFIT). Correct naming of the participants’ composites was found to reduce reliably when target faces were paired with the weapon at 10 s but not at 30 s. These data suggest that the presence of a weapon reduces the effectiveness of facial composites following a short encoding duration. Implications for theory and police practice are discussed.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords: | Facial composite; weapon; EvoFIT; law enforcement |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Psychology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 14 Jul 2022 15:56 |
Last Modified: | 14 Jul 2022 15:56 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Routledge |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/1068316x.2022.2079643 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:188615 |
Download
Filename: The impact of weapons and unusual objects on the construction of facial composites.pdf
Licence: CC-BY 4.0