Identification decisions are formulated not only by the quality of the witness’s memory, but also by social perception. Other variables that moderate eyewitness memory can be categorized as commonplace variables, however others are specific biases based on the suspect’s characteristics (Brewer & Wells, 2011). Since the advent of DNA testing, 258 people convicted by juries in the United States have been released, with approximately 200 of these cases being the result of mistaken eyewitness identification. With cognitive and social perspectives, this study simply reviewed the variables that produce general impairments of identification accuracy, post-identification indicators of identification accuracy, and variables that naturally result in biases against the suspect without any specific theoretical frame of reference (Brewer & Wells, 2011).
Decision confidence latency and phenomenological reports have all been found to discriminate positive decisions, without including lineup rejections (Brewer & Wells, 2011).…