We hope everyone enjoyed #apls2026! See you next year for #apls2027 in Louisville! @aplssc.bsky.social

A haiku for my labmate, Taylor Tracy, who presented her first-ever AP-LS poster this year:

Opt-out instructions
Might result in info loss
But we found no change

Instead, witnesses
lowered their criterion
for high-conf judgments.

#apls2026

Very delayed haikus from #apls2026 for my friend Katie Cunius (UNR), as is tradition:

When a defendant
Is in an extremist group
schemas sway verdicts

Rebecca Ying presenting "A Shocking Failure of Source Memory: Repeated-Suspect Presentations Contaminate Memory and Put Innocent Suspects at Risk."

Katie Cunius, Rebecca Ying, Nydia Ayala, Taylor Tracy at dinner.

I had an amazing time at #apls2026 in Reno! I was excited to present my recent work examining how repeated-suspect presentations contaminate memory and put innocent suspects at risk. It was also lovely to spend time with some of my favorite people. ☺️

Can't wait for Louisville next year!

Poster for American Psychology-Law Society Conference Reno, NV 2026 A Shocking Failure of Source Memory: Repeated-Suspect Procedures Contaminate Memory and Put Innocent Suspects at Risk Rebecca C. Ying, Andrew M. Smith, & John T. Wixted Saturday, March 14, 4:10PM – 4:22PM Tuscany 6 Showups Conducted Under Field-Conditions Yield Overconfident Choosers and Highly Accurate Rejectors Mitchell L. Eisen & Rebecca C. Ying Saturday, March 14, 4:22PM – 4:34PM Tuscany 6 Should Eyewitnesses Viewing Lineups be Provided With an Explicit Option to Indicate That They are “Not Sure”? Taylor E. Tracy, Andrew M. Smith, & Rebecca C. Ying Saturday, March 14, 6:30PM Poster Session, Tuscany 1/A

Excited to be at #apls2026 in Reno, NV!

Hoping everyone will pop by and hear about some of the work I've been doing in the past year.

I’ll be there & would love to be added!

Very excited to announce that I will be joining the Department of Psychological Science at Kennesaw State University as an Assistant Professor this upcoming Fall! ☺️

"AI-Faces by Illinois" include 1,152 AI-generated images of children by age (3-15), gender, eight racial background, and emotion (smile, angry, sad). Images (osf.io/vurm5/) and Preprint available(doi.org/10.31234/osf...) with @brendacstraka.bsky.social and @Dr. Michael Rizzo!

Excited to present in the Artificial Intelligence and Human Memory symposium at 3:45 alongside some really great researchers. Hope y’all can drop by! #psynom2025 @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

It's been 20+ years since researchers recommended that police videorecord lineups. But no one has empirically tested the diagnostic value of these videos... until now.

Here, we provide a compelling case to mandate the videorecording of lineup procedures.

Finding #3:
Witnesses' lineup behavior can diagnose high-confidence mistaken identifications. When witnesses are highly confident but their behavior indicates a weak and disfluent recognition experience, the CJS system should doubt their accuracy.

Finding #2:
Not only did witness behaviors discriminate between accurate and inaccurate decisions, but they also improved classification performance over and above confidence and decision speed.

Finding #1:
Accurate witnesses behaved markedly different than inaccurate witnesses—a strong and fluent recognition experience implied accuracy and a weak and disfluent recognition experience implied inaccuracy.

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Why should police video-record lineups?

We videorecorded 1496 witnesses as they completed lineups. We coded the behaviors that these witnesses demonstrated and subjected the resulting data to machine learning analyses.

Link and findings below!

Why are lineup rejections less diagnostic of innocence than suspect identifications are of guilt?

Take a look at our preprint for insight on this all-too-common finding of the eyewitness id literature.

‼️ Another new preprint ‼️

Here, we find that video recordings of lineup procedures can aid us with diagnosing witness accuracy (over and above confidence and decision time).

This project provides even more evidence that the legal system should mandate video recording lineups.

That’s kinda the idea behind dual process signal detection theory (DPSDT)! DPSDT posits that positive decisions are governed by two processes - recollection and familiarity- whereas negative (rejection) decisions are only governed by familiarity.

These findings contradict recent inferences that in the context of eyewitness lineups, target variability is less than or equal to lure variability and brings models of eyewitness memory in line with longstanding findings from the basic recognition literature!

Here, we examined DPSDT and UVSDT models & found that they were able to account for residual asymmetry (& improved model fit relative to the EVSDT model). These models suggest that the visual recognition system is better at detecting target presence than target absence.

When lineups are modified so that we always get suspect-specific confidence (see prev work on the Rule Out), the rejection-inferiority effect is reduced but not eliminated.

Lineups are a flawed measurement tool. Suspect IDs & confidence directly map on to how well the suspect matches the witness’s memory for the culprit- a good proxy for guilt. Conversely, rejection decisions & confidence often measure memory strength of a filler.

(PDF) The Rejection-Inferiority Effect: Why are Eyewitness Lineups More Effective at Demonstrating Guilt than Innocence? PDF | Experimental research on eyewitness lineups demonstrates a rejection-inferiority effect: the inculpatory value of lineups exceeds the exculpatory... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

🚨 New preprint available!

In this paper, we look at why lineups better inculpate the guilty than they do exculpate the innocent (the rejection-inferiority effect).

W/ Andrew Smith, Jim Lampinen, @nydia-ayala.bsky.social, & Ian Dobbins

🔗 www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Very excited to publicly share news about a new tool, Papercheck, that @debruine.bsky.social and me started to develop more than a year ago! In an introductory blog post, we explain our philosophy to automatically check scientific papers for best practices. daniellakens.blogspot.com/2025/06/intr...

Eyewitness Lineup Identity (ELI) database Hosted on the Open Science Framework

For anyone interested in conducting lineup identification research, check out this valuable database of research materials generously shared by #SARMAC2025 presenter Ryan Fitzgerald, Stefana Juncu, @evaribbers.bsky.social and @evarubinova.bsky.social osf.io/vrj3u @sarmac2025.bsky.social

Good luck on your talk- wish I could be there to see it!!! I’m really feeling the FOMO this year with so many cool eyewitness sessions 🫠

Meet the AP-LS Campus Representatives! Today we have Rebecca Ying from Iowa State University's Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. program.

Reviewer notes: That’s a very nice mediation analysis you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. Mediation analysis has gotten a lot of flak, including classic titles such as “Yes, but what’s the mechanism? (Don’t expect an easy answer)” (Bullock et al., 2010), “What mediation analysis can (not) ...

New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words!

If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance.

www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

Trainee Interest for Formative and Interactive Review (FAIR) To participate in FAIR, you must be an early career researcher (undergraduate to post-doc) in psychology, neuroscience, or a related field. We offer multiple ways to engage in FAIR, depending on your...

📚 Are you an early career researcher (undergrad to postdoc) in psych, neuro, or a related field?

Are you seeking feedback on an unsubmitted manuscript or a response to reviews?

Our “pre-review” program offers feedback from experienced reviewers!

👇 Learn more & apply:

go.iu.edu/rzfair

In Australia,
Risk assessment is the big
Forensic question.

(Not like the US,
Where competency is the
Biggest referral)

@tessneal.bsky.social

#APLS2025 #PsychLaw
#AcademicHaiku