Those of us who testify as expert witnesses on eyewitness identification have done so on increasingly solid ground as a result of the plethora of research on this topic in the past decade. This trend reflects the movement within the field of cognitive psychology to encompass applied as well as basic research topics. The process of eyewitness identification has attracted the attention of cognitive psychologists because it is such a complex and real cognitive operation, because the consequences of eyewitness identification accuracy are potentially dire, and because it is rewarding to do research that can be applied so immediately. However, because the research on eyewitness identification is published in diverse sources, many of which are difficult to locate for psychologistsรnearly impossible to locate for attorneysรI welcomed two new books aimed at synthesizing and integrating this research. However, given that at least six other scientific books on eyewitness identification (excluding the books on children as witnesses) have been published since Elizabeth Loftus published Eyewitness Testimony in 1979, I expected that these two new books might be `more of the same'. But I was pleased to find that new research, new topics and new approaches to conceptually framing the problem are presented in both of these books.
Adult Eyewitness Testimony, edited by David Ross, Don Read and Mike Toglia, is a meaty compilation of research. The text is divided into three sections. Section one, the most standard section, includes seven chapters on cognitive, physical and social factors that relate to the accuracy of eyewitness identification. Although most of the topics in this section are fairly predictable (e.g., suggestibility and memory, source monitoring, familiarity, unconscious transference, earwitness memory), there is sufficient new material that most readers will actually learn quite a bit. Also, John Yuille's research on actual witnesses to actual crimes adds his unique trademark to the book. Section two includes five chapters and provides updated information on how to construct a lineup. This very specific material will be especially useful to psychologists who consult with police departments regarding how to collect eyewitness evidence. Section three, the most distinctive in the book, includes six chapters on how to distinguish accurate from inaccurate eyewitness identifications. Although cognitive psychologists have traditionally avoided the investigation of individual differences factors in their research for common underlying cognitive processes, the identification of numerous individual differences factors that predict identification accuracy is in some ways compelling.
Most of the findings reported in the 18 chapters in Adult Eyewitness Testimony follow from reliable empirical methods. However, the fact that most edited books are the product of invited chapters creates a discrepancy between the editorial scrutiny of most book chapters versus peer-reviewed journal articles. For example, in Chapter 15, the statistical significance of individual differences factors is presented based on simple Pearson correlation coefficients, ignoring the fact that there is likely to be shared variance among the various predictor variables. Also, in Chapter 13 several experiments are presented in which purely introspective