Artificial Intelligence-based investigation of filler selection strategies

Lineup construction relies on matching fillers to the suspect's appearance or to the eyewitness's description of the perpetrator (match to description, MTD). Recent work shows that low (vs. high)-similarity fillers beyond MTD improve discriminability. We tested lineups constructed with differing suspect-filler (SF) similarity levels beyond MTD (low, moderate, high) against MTD only, varying exposure duration, culprit race, and innocent suspect-culprit resemblance (guilty-innocent [GI] similarity).

We expected the highest discriminability for low-SF similarity lineups, moderate next, MTD-only lower, and high lowest-alongside higher discriminability for long (cf. short) exposures, same-race (cf. cross-race) culprits, and low GI similarity (cf. high). We expected high-SF similarity to better protect high GI similarity innocents and low F-similarity to aid culprit identifications regardless of GI similarity. We also anticipated stronger benefits of low-SF similarity lineups for cross-race culprits and shorter exposures.

All lineups, except MTD only, were constructed using an artificial intelligence-driven, objective, and reproducible measure and varied by SF similarity. Participants (N = 2,644) recruited via Prolific watched four short or long videos (half with White, half with African American culprits), completed a distractor task, and made lineup identifications (culprit-present or culprit-absent) with confidence ratings.

Both low- and high-SF similarity lineups produced higher discriminability than MTD-only lineups. While low-SF similarity lineups enhanced guilty suspect detection, high-SF similarity lineups better protected innocent suspects. Furthermore, low-SF similarity lineups yielded the best identification accuracy, and high-SF similarity lineups yielded the best diagnosticity ratio. No interactions emerged.

Using match-to-suspect beyond MTD-especially at the highest or lowest SF similarity-improves lineup performance regardless of factors outside the justice system's control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).