ArticlePsychiatry, psychology, and law : an interdisciplinary journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law2024
The effect of surgical masks on identification decisions from masked and unmasked lineups.
Article in Psychiatry, psychology, and law : an interdisciplinary journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Predicting accuracy in eyewitness showups: confidence and response time in the laboratory, confidence in the field.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- Masked and elusive: congruency fails in video-to-photo face matching.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- Congruency effects and individual differences in masked face recognition under limited feature visibility.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While research has shown that wearing a disguise hinders lineup identifications, less is known about how to conduct lineups in cases of disguised perpetrators. We examined the influence of surgical masks, worn during a crime event (encoding) and within lineups (retrieval), on eyewitness identification accuracy. In our experiment, 452 participants watched a mock-crime video and identified the perpetrator from either a target-present or a target-absent simultaneous lineup. Contrary to expectations based on the encoding specificity principle, we did not find that matching the presence of masks in the lineup to the encoding condition increased identification accuracy. Instead, compared to the condition with no masks at encoding and retrieval, the presence of masks at either stage negatively affected discriminability and undermined the predictive utility of confidence and decision time. Our findings indicate that when a witness has encountered a masked perpetrator, presenting them with a masked lineup may not be necessary.
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