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Forensic psychology
Forensic psychology

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5 Summary of Week 5

Figure 19

This week you have explored the psychology of face recognition, and seen some of the reasons why eyewitnesses find it so hard to describe and identify the face of the person they saw commit the crime.

Although our everyday experience is that our face recognition skills are extremely accurate, they do not appear to be able to cope so well with many of the demands placed on an eyewitness. This includes describing the face of the perpetrator, constructing a visual image of their face and even recognising their face, particularly if they are of a different ethnicity or age group than our own.

Next week, you’ll explore the eyewitness identification techniques used by the police, and see whether psychological knowledge might be of use in improving such techniques. You will also return to our investigation and see how DI Bullet and DS Sund use identification procedures to help progress their cases.

You can now go to Week 6 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .