My term as Digital Content Editor of the Psychonomic Society will come to an end on 31 December. The next day, I will start serving on the Society’s Governing Board. Building up the Featured Content section and running this blog has been an extremely enjoyable experience during the last 5 years. We ran our first post on 25 September 2014, and this post is the 472nd since then.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce my successor, Professor Laura Mickes, who will take over the reins on 1 January 2020.
Laura used to be a Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London until recently, and she is about to become a Professor of Psychology at the University of Bristol! Her move is great news for my university but also great news for the handover process—we probably won’t have to Skype to sort out technical details.
Laura is best known for her ground-breaking work on eyewitness identification, much of it conducted in collaboration with John Wixted at UCSD. The key findings of her work are:
- When a witness expresses high confidence in an identification at the first opportunity at the line-up stage, it is likely to be correct. That is, it is highly likely that the identified person is the offender.
- Confidence is extremely informative, but there is a major caveat: confidence is only informative when collected on the first memory test (i.e. at the first opportunity at the police investigation stage).
- Making an identification in court is unreliable, and is by all accounts contaminated forensic evidence.
- The practice in the US produces more reliable outcomes than current UK practice.
- Accuracy and the reliability with which suspects are identified can be significantly improved in the UK, which will result in safer convictions and better outcomes for victims and witnesses of crime.
- Higher eyewitness confidence and reliable identifications can result in significant savings.
Her work has already had a significant influence on real-world policy, and it underscores the often-unrealized potential of bridging basic and applied research. Laura’s work has been recognized in many ways, including through the Psychonomic Society’s Early Career Award last year.
I asked Laura about her plans for the Featured Content section, and she replied:
“My goal as the next Digital Content Editor is to promote the Psychonomic Society and grow the Digital Content audience and encourage participation among the Psychonomic Society members, the wider scientific community, and importantly the general public by communicating the research and news of the Psychonomic Society members. The excellent features that are already in place, including Featured Content, Special Features, and Resources for Research, will continue. To keep our research relevant, new methods for communicating our often-complex ideas will be exploited, these may include podcast style interviews, videoed poster presentations, and rich interactive data. Psychonomic Society digital team will trial different approaches and build on what works best with the readership and beyond.”
I took the liberty to highlight the initiatives that I found particularly interesting. What a great idea to add podcasts to our repertoire. I look forward to this new feature.
Here is Laura’s first podcast: