Memory Retrieval Within Criminal Justice Investigation

¶ … Recognition Within Criminal Justice Setting

Within the criminal justice profession the act of memory retrieval is essential to the act of investigating cases of all variety -- from the petty theft committed by a purse-snatcher to the wanton violence inflicted by a murderer -- because invariably the state's case against those accused will involve the statements of sworn eyewitnesses. While the American system of jurisprudence has placed a great deal of faith in the ability of ordinary people to recall sequences of events and crucial details under high-stress circumstances, as well as their proficiency at recognizing facial features and identifying markers during the commission of a crime, contemporary research on the subject of memory retrieval suggests that this trust may be misplaced. An article published in 2008 on the divergence between recall and recognition -- written by a team of British researchers led by Charlie D. Frowd and titled "Improving the Quality of Facial Composites Using a Holistic Cognitive Interview" -- illuminated the various differences in terms of cognitive processing, retention and accuracy between these two fundamental tools in criminal investigation. According to Frowd's explication of recall and recognition, "the former is concerned with verbalizing information, such as events and facial appearance; the latter, with comparing whether an image or person being presented is the same as that seen previously (i.e., at the scene of the crime)" (Frowd et al., 2008), and while recall and recognition may appear to be merely functions of memory, the complex nature of each process must be understood completely by the criminal justice system if they are to be exploited as effectively and accurately as possible.

One of the central objectives of the research conducted by Frowd and his team concerned the ways in which recall and recognition occur on a cognitive level, and their conclusion is that "the recall and recognition of visual information are known to be largely separate mental processes & #8230; (as) the underlying neural mechanisms also reside in separate lobes of the brain" (Frowd et al., 2008). According to the article's subsequent analysis of this underlying neural activity, "although recognition tends to be a fast, accurate, automatic process, and is reasonably stable over time, the serial recall of information is effortful, takes much longer, and decays considerably more rapidly" (Frowd et al., 2008). By arming themselves with this emerging knowledge on the function of memory retrieval, those working in the field of criminal justice can refine their interviewing techniques, discern between reliable and unreliable eyewitness testimony, and apply the evidence obtained during interaction with witnesses in a more productive manner. One of the most useful ways in which Frowd's research and recall and recognition can be integrated into criminal investigation involves the standard law enforcement practice of using facial composite systems to determine whether or not a witness recognizes a suspect or subject of interest. As Frowd observes in the article, facial composites are generally considered to be unreliable as a sole means of identification, and the author cites numerous studies which have indicated facial composites are only accurate 20% of the time even under favorable conditions (2008). The brain tends to encode memories involving human faces on a generalized level for the sake of efficiency -- as the vast majority of faces one encounters in everyday life have no reason to be remembered -- and Frowd shows that this streamlined cognitive process can actually act as a barrier to accurate identification via recognition of facial composite systems. Instead, Frowd recommends that criminal justice professionals utilize a novel concept known as Holistic Interviewing (HI), in which "witnesses watch a video of an unfamiliar target face, then both describe and rate the personality of the face before constructing a facial composite" (2008), because this process of evaluating personality cues within a stranger's face has been shown to bypass the brain's natural tendency to encode facial memories on a generalized basis.