Diversity Will Benefit Eyewitness Science

Reply by the current authors to the comments made by D. Stephen Lindsay and Eric Y. Mah (see record 2022-03244-001), Yueran Yang and Sarah A. Moody (see record 2022-03244-002), Lora M. Levett , Cassidy B. Haigh, and Gissel Perez (see record 2022-03244-003), Amy Bradfield Douglass (see record 2022-03244-004), Ira E. Hyman Jr. (see record 2022-03244-005) and Laura Smalarz (see record 2022-03244-006) on the original article (see record 2021-79725-001). In their article, Kovera et al argued that as cognitively trained scholars turned their attention to the study of eyewitness identification accuracy, the types of theories, analyses, and methods used by researchers in this area changed. These changes brought an increased reliance on signal detection as a theoretical framework, analysis of data using receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves, and online data collection. The authors expressed their concerns about proclamations that SDT-based theories can describe all aspects of the eyewitness experience, the ubiquity of online data collection using paradigms that fail to capture the social context in which eyewitness decisions are made and the position that ROC is the only analysis that will provide useful information to policy makers. The authors do not believe that SDT-based theories are uninformative, that online data collection produces low-quality data that fail to answer interesting research questions, or that ROC analyses should not be conducted. Nevertheless, eyewitness research of late has been dominated by a small set of theories, methods, and analyses and that attempts to dominate the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)