Using live-action 360-degree video to assess the impact of exposure duration on eyewitness identification accuracy at high confidence in children and adults

The pristine conditions hypothesis postulates that highly confident witnesses will be highly accurate, even when witnessing conditions are poor. Recent research has extended this to children and concluded that, on average, child-eyewitnesses who are highly confident are rather accurate (i.e., 85–97%, Winsor et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology. General 150:2387–2407, 2021). However, this has only been tested in good witnessing conditions. Since then, research in adults has shown that, in some poor witnessing conditions, the high confidence-accuracy relationship breaks down. We sought to determine if highly confident child and adult eyewitnesses would be highly accurate even in poor witnessing conditions. We presented 1,055 participants (485 young children, 357 older children, and 213 adults) with a 360-degree live-action mock-crime video in a virtual reality headset. To test whether witnessing conditions impact children’s confidence-accuracy relationship, we manipulated exposure duration (short-6 s, long-34 s) at encoding and the presence of the culprit in the lineup identification task. Surprisingly, memory strength was weak for all age groups under good and poor witnessing conditions. There were so few high confidence identifications in adults that the confidence-accuracy relationship could not be plotted. Importantly, we found that the pristine conditions hypothesis does not hold regardless of the state of the witnessing condition. This research suggests that there are boundary conditions to the pristine conditions hypothesis and that further research is needed to determine the boundary conditions of the pristine conditions hypothesis.