Re-evaluating the role of verbalisation of faces for composite production: Descriptions of offenders matter!

Abstract

Standard forensic practice necessitates that a witness describes an offender’s face prior to constructing a visual likeness, a facial composite. However, describing a face can interfere with face recognition, although a delay between description and recognition theoretically should alleviate this issue. In Experiment 1, participants produced a free recall description either 3-4 hours or 2 days after intentionally or incidentally encoding a target face, and then constructed a composite using a modern ‘feature’ system immediately or after 30-minutes. Unexpectedly, correct naming of composites significantly reduced following the 30-minute delay between description and construction for targets encoded 2 days previously. In, Experiment 2, participants in these conditions gave descriptions that were better matched to their targets by independent judges, a result which suggests that the 30-minute delay actually impairs access to details of recalled descriptions that are valuable for composite effectiveness. Experiment 3 found the detrimental effect of description delay extended to composites constructed from a ‘holistic’ face production system. The results have real-world but counterintuitive implications for witnesses who construct a face one or two days after a crime: after having recalled the face to a practitioner, an appreciable delay (here, 30 minutes) should be avoided before starting face construction.