Perception may affect the immediate encoding of these unreliable notions due to prejudices, which can influence the speed of processing and classification of racially ambiguous targets. Mono-racial eyewitnesses may depend on categorization more than multiracial eyewitnesses, who develop a more fluid concept of race. In general, memory is an individual process and that conceptualization of race causes racial ambiguity in facial recognition. Most research has shown that white eyewitnesses exhibit the other-race effect, however this effect does extend to other races too. Research on the other race effect has mainly focused on the African American and Caucasian races. A final suggestion is that faces of the same race are encoded more deeply, leading a witness to have a more detailed memory for those faces but there has not been much research to support this hypothesis. However, other races might not encode these same features. Another hypothesis is that each race pays attention to certain facial details to differentiate between faces. The socio-cognitive account predicts that motivational and/or attentional components over focus on the race of a person. The perceptual expertise account suggests that with an increase of exposure to one's own race, perceptual mechanisms develop which allow people to be more proficient at remembering faces of their own race. Various explanations for this effect have been proposed. Studies investigating this effect have shown that a person is better able to recognize faces that match their own race but are less reliable at identifying other more unfamiliar races, thus inhibiting encoding. the own-race bias, cross-race effect, other-ethnicity effect, same-race advantage) is one factor thought to impact the accuracy of facial recognition.

Unreliability of eyewitness identifications may be a result of mismatching between how faces are holistically processed and how composite systems retrieve features in faces during an event.

Face-specific cognitive and neural processes show contributions to holistic processing and recognition in the episodic memories of eyewitnesses. Because courts rely on eyewitness facial recognition, it is important to acknowledge that identification is not always accurate. It can only get more challenging for a person to accurately encode a face when they themselves are experiencing a traumatic event. This finding provides a starting point for estimating the accuracy of eyewitnesses' identification of others involved in a traumatic event. When participants were given a basic memory test from an array of photos or a lineup, they struggled to accurately identify the images and had low recognition. People struggle to identify faces in person or from photos, a difficulty arising from the encoding of faces. Įncoding During the event Challenges of identifying faces It is important to inform the public about the flawed nature of eyewitness memory and the difficulties relating to its use in the criminal justice system so that eyewitness accounts are not viewed as the absolute truth. The Innocence Project determined that 75% of the 239 DNA exoneration cases had occurred due to inaccurate eyewitness testimony. States of high emotional arousal, which occur during a stressful or traumatic event, lead to less efficient memory processing. This may be due to the fact that details of unpleasant emotional events are recalled poorly compared to neutral events.

A growing body of research now supports this speculation, indicating that mistaken eyewitness identification is responsible for more convictions of the innocent than all other factors combined. It has long been speculated that mistaken eyewitness identification plays a major role in the wrongful conviction of innocent individuals. Experts have found evidence to suggest that eyewitness memory is fallible. However, the accuracy of eyewitness memories is sometimes questioned because there are many factors that can act during encoding and retrieval of the witnessed event which may adversely affect the creation and maintenance of the memory for the event. It can also refer to an individual's memory for a face, where they are required to remember the face of their perpetrator, for example. Eyewitness testimony is often relied upon in the judicial system. Imperfect recall of a crime or other dramatic eventĮyewitness memory is a person's episodic memory for a crime or other witnessed dramatic event.

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