Eyewitness Testimony: The Bruce and Young Model

Eyewitness testimony is an event where participants state what they have witnessed. For example, at a trail they may have to give details of a road accident someone has seen. Stating the identification of the perpetrators and what they saw. Eyewitness testimony is important and necessary to the legal system. It is a necessity in criminal trials to reconstruct events from past occurrences. This is where eyewitnesses are important. Facial recognition can be defined by whether a face is known by gazing only at their face or an image of their face. This is important as it tells us important information and specific details of what the people involved looked like facially.

The major model of facial recognition was the Bruce and Young model. The Bruce and Young model are when the structural encoding stage begins. It is when a mental representation of the face is produced meaning the brain identifies something that looks like a human face. This is where the brain processing stage takes place to decide peoples gender, age, eye colour, hair colour, height and more. The relocation of the face is then compared to the data of every face stored. When a face matches with the information shared then they have a sense of recognition. When a match happens, they access the person identity nodes which store personal information about the person’s name.

The limitation of facial recognition is the breach of privacy. The aid of this type of facial recognition is so that the government can track down criminals. However, it can track down anyone anytime. Which does not think about the ethics and privacy of individuals. As for example, the USA government stores several citizens' pictures without their consent. Therefore, even if facial recognition provides benefits, there is work to be done before the facial recognition factor is 100% used fairly and in agreement with the human rights act for privacy.

There is evidence of a case study conducted into somebody known as Mr W. Mr w was a 54-year-old farmer with bilateral occipital lobe lesions. This is a type of damage to a part of the brain. In this case it is found at the back of the brain and is responsible for vision. He could not recognise faces; he could not even recognise his own face. However, there were certain things he could do. He could match unfamiliar faces. He could also pick faces from objects and animals. He could copy line drawing of faces and he could identify the sex of faces correctly without ques or prompting. He has accurately perceived facial expressions and randomly could identify his own sheep.

What this is implying is that the modular way in which facial recognition takes place means that you can retain certain parts of the facial recognition system and yet lose the function of other parts of the facial recognition system. This shows that the Bruce and Young model suggests it is more than good as Mr W had a facial recognition to most things from recognising himself. He was able to use his other parts of the brain to gather the things he recognised.

Weapon focus is the theory that if you are being attacked you are more likely to focus on the weapon itself because it is an unfamiliar and violent object than you are to focus on the perpetrators face and so therefore, it leads to issues with eyewitness testimony because you are more unlikely to currently identify a face you have not spent time looking at.

There is evidence of an experimental study, conducted to provide support for the ‘weapon focus’ effect. Where it affects eyewitnesses during crimes with a weapon. Loftus et al., in the experiment conducted, used 36 students from the University of Washington. Loftus was the professor. The students were aged between 18-31. 13 of them were participants getting extra credits in their psychology degree. The 23 other participants were recruited from an advert and were paid £3.50 for their participation. The study provided 18 slides showing a group of people moving through a queue in a restaurant. The control and experiment were the conditions involved in the study. Person B acted differently in both conditions. Person B was the second in line. The experimental condition, person B pulled out a gun. The control condition, person B handed the cashier a cheque.

Participants' answers on the study were not significantly different between both conditions. 8.5% of results were by chance. In the control condition without the gun, 38.9% (7 people) identified the correct person B, whereas only 11.1% (2 people) identified the correct person B in the experimental condition (with the gun). On average the people in the experiment conditions based on eye measurements spent 3.72 seconds looking at the gun, whereas an average of 2.44 seconds for the control conditions was looking at the cheque

This implies good evidence for weapon focus. As the participants spent longer looking at the weapon when one was present. As a result of this, the participants in the experimental condition experienced greater difficulties when trying to identify person B. Loftus et al., stated there is likely to have an increase of attentional narrowing as the weapon focus would be a larger factor in real life as the witness will be more stimulated. As a result of the experiment replicating similar results to the factor, it concludes the experiment is high in reliability.

Reviewing the conducted factor relating to eyewitness testimony, Bruce and young model and weapon focus. The model would be most likely to affect the eyewitness testimony more positively. Reason for this is an enhanced security system. This is when surveillance is implanted to ensure facial recognition when tracking down any burglar or other trespassers. Terrorists can be identified on government level by facial recognition with the help of face scan only.

Whereas, weapon focus is more likely to affect eyewitness testimony in a more negative way. As there is less control over extraneous variables that might bias the results. This would make it difficult for other researchers to replicate the study in the same way. Also, researchers may have guessed the aims of the study because the participants knew they were going to partake in an experiment.

Therefore, Bruce and Young model would affect eyewitness testimony more positively as the evidence was stronger and provided more ways it can be used in the real world.

References

• Becominghuman (2019) THE THREATS AND BENEFITS OF FACIAL RECGONITON: WHAT SHOULD WE KNOW? [online] https://becominghuman.ai/the-threats-and-benefits-of-facial-recognition-what-should-we-know-17008f69ae74 [2 July 2020].
• Bruce, V and Young A. (1986) – Understanding Face Recognition, Journal of Psychology, 77, 305-327.
• Clevelandclinic (2018) BRAIN LESIONS [online] available from https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17839-brain-lesions [2 July 2020].
• Johnson H, and Scott T. (2015) WEAPON FOCUS [online] available from https://getrevising.co.uk/grids/weapon_focus_johnson_and_scott [2 July 2020].
• Loftus et al., (1987) – Some Facts About ‘’Weapon Focus’’, Journal of Law and Human Behaviour 11 (1), 55-62.
• Oxford Bibliographies (2018) EYEWITNESS TESITMONY [online] available from https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199828340/obo-9780199828340-0026.xml [2 July].
• Puce, A. (2001) FACE RECOGNITON: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND NEURAL ASPECTS [online] available from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/facial-recognition#:~:text=Face%20Recognition%3A%20Psychological%20and%20Neural%20Aspects&text=Face%20recognition%20can%20be%20defined,an%20image%20of%20their%20face. [2 July 2020]
• YouTube (2012) BRUCE AND YOUNG 1986 MODEL OF FACE RECOGNITON [online] available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouVdZaIJpYc&t=101s [2 July]