Confirming Recognition: P300 as a reliable index for witness identification through the Guilty Face Test (GFT)

Abstract: This paper provides an answer to the requests that has been made for witness confrontations to become an accurate and reliable tool in the court. This was achieved by the development and testing of the Guilty Face Test (GFT). Facial stimuli was used in a Target Present lineup were the enhanced elicitation of the Even-Related Potential component P300 confirmed recognition of the culprit. The participants were thereafter asked to respond to a task of color recognition and the paradigm does thus include both a Memory oddball (the culprit) and an Attention oddball (the target color). The results provided significant effects of both Memory and Attention and thereby confirms the hypotheses of an enhanced P300 when the culprit is present. Importantly was this effect of recognition independent from the attention that was directed to the task and with that could did this study confirm the P300 as a reliable index for witness identifications through the GFT. The study also found fascinating tendencies of a possible differentiation on the spatial distribution -dependent of Memory and Attention.