Comparing eyewitness verbal facial description and visual facial configuration of suspects: effects on recognition performance

Purpose Before witnesses to a crime identify a suspect from a lineup, law enforcement routinely requires witnesses to provide a facial description or facial composite of the suspect. However, research suggests that witnesses who engage in facial recall of suspects could have impaired subsequent recognition performance of that suspect. This study aims to compare facial description and facial configuration tasks and examine whether these procedures influenced memory strength and response criterion during recognition. In a verbal facial description task, witnesses describe the facial features of a suspect. In a visual facial configuration task, witnesses choose individual facial features that resemble the suspect from arrays of feature alternatives. Design/methodology/approach Participants in the study witnessed a surveillance video depicting a burglary. Next, participants either provided a description of the suspect’s face, being prompted to describe the facial features, or engaged in a facial configuration task of the suspect’s face, selecting the facial features that best resembled the suspect from arrays of other facial feature options. Participants in a no-recall control condition did not recall the suspect. Last, participants attempted to identify the suspect from either a target present or target absent showup recognition task. Findings Results showed no evidence of reduced memory strength. However, participants in both facial recall conditions adopted more conservative response criteria than those in the control condition, particularly participants in the facial configuration condition. Practical implications Findings have important theoretical implications for theory development regarding how witness facial recall of suspects impacts recognition performance and applied implications for eyewitness investigative procedures. Originality/value Verbal overshadowing research has examined the effects of facial recall on recognition for 30+ years; however, few studies have directly compared verbal facial descriptions with visual facial configuration procedures within the same paradigm.