Earwitnesses: the effect of type of vocal differences on correct identification and confidence accuracy

Abstract

Individual voice and speech characteristics are important for earwitness identification. A target-absent line-up with six foils was used to analyse the influence of voice and speech features on recognition. To create ecologically valid conditions for voice recognition, the present study used voices in conversation in the target event and for the foils. The participants were particularly successful in rejecting the two voice foils that were most dissimilar to the target voice in articulation rate and pitch. These two foils were also given somewhat higher confidence judgments than the other foils, although the level of that confidence was still somewhat low. In fact, participants as a collective were underconfident for these two foils but were overconfident for the other foils. In addition, they showed somewhat better ability in their confidence judgments to distinguish correct and incorrect responses for the two most dissimilar foils than for the four foils for which their identification responses were less successful. For the other four foils, which were more similar to the target voice, the participants showed in their confidence judgments very poor ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect identifications. Later positions in the parade were more often (erroneously) identified as the culprit, regardless of the specific foils used in those positions.