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Some of us may have fond memories of rustling through all the board games in the closet or tucked away on our bookshelves. Maybe your favorite was Candy Land or Scrabble, or maybe I am just showing my own age by mentioning any type of game that doesn’t come attached to a digital device. Regardless, many say that childhood is a time of playing and learning. But one game in particular may actually relate to something that could turn those fun and games, as a child, into false identification or worse, false imprisonment of someone who may be innocent, as an adult.
The game Guess Who (Hasbro, 2022) involves 24 different characters that are set up on two separate hinged picture boards. Each player chooses a random card with their character on it. This character then has to be “guessed” by the opponent by asking a series of questions about the other players character, until ultimately, someone “guesses who” and is the winner. Players may ask things like “is your person a female?” or “do they have blonde hair?”. While it is a fun game of reasoning and some luck, it only has a set number of possibilities. Now imagine you are walking along and suddenly hear the sound of someone in distress. You look around and notice a scuffle between two people has ensued but aren’t sure what is going on. As you look you suddenly hear the sound of a gunshot ringing out and see someone fleeing. Could you accurately describe the person you saw to the police? How about after a few days had gone by?
A study by Ouyang and colleagues (2016) states that studies have shown that accuracy in memory declines very rapidly within only an hour of witnessing someone’s facial features. This trend continues upwards of 24 hours after an event. This can pose a pretty large issue in getting an accurate sketch produced since many times sketch artists do not meet witnesses until a day or more after the event. Now we may all tell ourselves that we not only could remember someone in enough detail to get an accurate depiction, but we may also even be pretty certain about that statement. We know they were a man/woman, or we are sure their eyes were brown, and they definitely had a beard or a ponytail. But do these attributes actually help a sketch artist? Can we truly recall how wide their eyes or cheekbones were or maybe how their nose was shaped? An article by Kenneth Lang (2022), a former forensic sketch artist, found that having confidence in what you saw does not mean that what you will describe is actually accurate. When you are playing a simple board game with familiar characters it may be easy to recall these details, but seeing a stranger tends to be much more difficult to accurately recall unless they have a very distinctive feature.
While most of us would probably want to be as helpful as possible when it comes to being witness to a crime, we may fall much shorter than our expectations. Perhaps increased confidence leading to less accurate depictions also has the same effect when it is reversed. What was called a poor and almost cartoon-like sketch drawn by a witness in Lancaster, Pa actually did lead to an arrest (Horton, 2018). If you haven’t heard about it, check out the sketch and suspect here on The Washington Post. This may not be an ideal way to catch a criminal, but who are we to judge what works?
Maybe playing Guess Who (Hasbro, 2022) won’t help us be the best witness to a forensic sketch artist. I mean, it isn’t our fault we don’t have the best memory when it comes to recalling faces in detail. But perhaps next time, we can have less confidence in our abilities and try to focus on the features that will help someone stick out. After all, we wouldn’t want to describe someone incorrectly and possibly be part of the reason they are falsely accused or even charged with a crime they did not commit. Even if, like the Washington Post article, there is still hope for those of us with less than stellar artistic skills.
References
Hasbro. (2022). Hasbro.com. https://shop.hasbro.com/en-us/product/guess-who-classic-game/7DEC61D9-5056-9047-F55F-FC686C17D23F
Horton, A. (2018, February 8). A witness drew this terrible sketch to help police identify a suspect. It actually worked. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/02/08/a-witness-drew-this-terrible-sketch-to-help-police-identify-a-suspect-it-actually-worked/
Lang, K. R. (2022). Police Sketches: An Analysis of Witness Confidence, Accuracy, and Conviction Ratings. Journal of Forensic Identification, 72(4), 462-485. https://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/police- sketches-analysis-witness-confidence/docview/2736849526/se-2
Ouyang, S., Hospedales, T. M., Song, Y.-Z., & Li, X. (2016). ForgetMeNot: Memory-Aware Forensic Facial Sketch Matching. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. https://doi.org/10.1109/cvpr.2016.601
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