Abstract
To inform a criminal investigation, police may ask an eyewitness to that crime to try to identify the perpetrator from a line-up. Eyewitnesses, however, have a bad reputation for being unreliable. That reputation is due to, in part, the fact that eyewitness researchers once viewed the relationship between the accuracy of an eyewitness’s initial identification and the confidence expressed in that identification as weak. 

Lab-based and field studies alike show that identifications made with high confidence are highly accurate whereas identifications made with low confidence are much less so. Confidence expressed during the initial procedure is therefore diagnostic of accuracy. When confidence is taken into account, the data challenges the longstanding notion that eyewitness memory is unreliable.

Biography
Laura Mickes is a Professor in the School of Psychological Science at the University of Bristol. Her research often focuses on increasing our understanding of basic and applied aspects of memory, for example eyewitness memory. 

In that domain, some of the research questions include: What explains the superiority of one police identification procedure over another? And how can we improve the value of eyewitness evidence?

For more information about her research can be found on her lab website.