Offender
Profiling Series: Vol 1
Interviewing and Deception
Edited by David Canter & Laurence Alison
(1999)
back to Interviewing
& Deception
Interviewing and Deception
Christine E Koehn, Ronald P. Fisher & Brian L. Cutler
Using Cognitive Interviewing to Construct
Facial Composites
Eyewitnesses are often interviewed shortly after
a crime to produce a facial composite of the perpetrator. We reviewed
the relevant literature to identify one promising interview technique
to maximise memory retrieval (Cognitive Interview) and one computer
system to facilitate constructing facial composites (Mac-A-Mug Pro System).
An experimental study is described in which witnesses observed a target
person and then, two days later, attempted to generate a facial composite.
The resulting composites were of very low quality (not at all similar
to a photograph of the target) and of no value in selecting the target
from a photo array. An analysis of the psychological components of facial
memory is presented to explain why the Mac-A-Mug system performs so
poorly in realistic eyewitness tasks, in which the target face is constructed
from memory. Suggestions are provided to improve facial composite systems
by making them more compatible with the psychological processes mediating
face recall. Finally, we offer some suggestions to improve the ecological
validity of experimental research to evaluate facial composite systems.
