Seeing Is Not Believing

I don’t know if any of you saw a BBC1 programme Eye Witness quite late on Sunday evening, looking at the question of the reliability, or otherwise, of eye witnesses. The programme makers set up a couple of scenarios for the group of guinea pigs to test their perceptions and recall of what actually happened. The results were frighteningly disparate, especially when you realise that as recently as 1907 someone could be convicted on eye witness testimony alone. The Criminal Law Review Committee, writing in 1971, stated that cases of mistaken identification “constitute by far the greatest cause of actual or possible wrong convictions”. Some of the subjects were given eye tracking devices which could record what specifically was catching attention, so we could judge the difference between recall and actual witnessing. Talk about subjective experience!

After a staged street armed robbery of a Securicor van, the ten eye witnesses were then interviewed by 8 of Manchester Police’s finest – with over 100 years experience between them. Some extraordinary claims were made, huge omissions, serious hallucinations and blatant inaccuracies. In the midst of this, one woman could recall the full registration number plate of the getaway car! The subjects were then asked to identify the two main protagonists from an ingenious rogues’ gallery, and demonstrated that recognition and recall were separate functions. As it turned out, recognition was significantly more reliable, with cognition losing out spectacularly to intuitive perception. The police in turn were able to make two accurate ‘arrests’.

The police were then shown the film of the ‘robbery’ and each stage of the event was listed. What was remarkable was that the police had generalised a highly accurate representation of the events as they occurred, drawing from the range of data provided by the eye witnesses.

This was a fascinating illustration of modelling out the structure of the event, identifying emergent patterns and keenly evaluating salience, from the widely varying data provided. The only piece they didn’t get was the fact that the third protagonist was a woman, despite one witnesses saying he had heard a woman’s voice. Since only one person reported this, this information was discarded.

I wonder how the sensory acuity of a group of NLP practitioners would stand up to such scrutiny!