Own-age bias in video lineups: a comparison between children and adults

Abstract

The present study investigated whether child (six–eight years of age) and adult witnesses (18–29 years of age) would exhibit an own-age bias when trying to identify targets from video lineups. One hundred and eighty-six participants viewed two filmed events that were identical, except one starred a child target and one a young adult. After a delay of two–three days each witness saw a lineup for the child and adult target. Children exhibited an own-age bias and were better at correctly identifying the own-age target from a target-present (TP) lineup and made more correct rejections for the own-age target-absent (TA) lineup. Adults however, showed a reversed own-age bias for the TP lineups as they made more correct identifications for the child target, but exhibited no bias for the TA lineups. The results suggest that differences in identification accuracy may be due to whether witness age and suspect age overlap.

Keywords:

• child eyewitness
• adult witnesses
• age
• identification accuracy
• recognition

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by funds from the Scottish Institute of Policing Research. The authors would like to thanks Moray Watt from Grampian Police for creating the VIPER lineups and Jack Jamieson for acting as our child target. We would also like to thank Jess Darby for collecting the rating data and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an early draft of this manuscript.