Seeing familiar faces out of context – would you know that face anywhere?

Dr Ailsa Strathie  discusses her recent work with another academic from the School, Dr Sarah Laurence on the limits of familiar face recognition, published in a new article in the journal Perception. Imagine you take a day trip to a town you rarely visit. While walking around you spot a former colleague who lives and works in this area.…

Introducing a new lecturer in the School, Sarah Laurence

We introduce a new lecturer in the School, Dr Sarah Laurence. Sarah, welcome to the School. Tell us about your interests and the area of psychology that you work in.  I am a cognitive psychologist with a particular interest in how we perceive and recognise faces.This topic has always fascinated me because faces are all…

Using the eyes of eyewitnesses

Graham Pike and Camilla Elphick talk about recently published research on eyewitness identification and pupillometry.  Working out how many people are convicted of a crime they did not commit is difficult for a variety of reasons, but estimates suggest that the number of miscarriages of justice may be something like 7% (in Australia) or 11%…

Do techniques for generating suspects contaminate procedures for identifying perpetrators?

First published on the Harm & Evidence Research Collaborative (HERC) website by Graham Pike and Jim Turner, The Open University. There is considerable evidence that mistaken identification by an eyewitness is the leading cause of miscarriages of justice. For example, research done by The Innocence Project, has found that eyewitness misidentification plays a role in more than 70% of overturned convictions…