One day the research conducted by Beth Schwartz-Kenney '86 may help put a criminal behind bars. Recently tenured as an associate professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Schwartz-Kenney is working on a "lineup kit" designed to help children identify strangers, a technique that could be applied in legal cases involving eyewitness testimony. According to Schwartz-Kenney, children as young as pre-school age can make competent witnesses but lack the cognitive and linguistic abilities to spontaneously report details of an event. Her research in children's eyewitness memory involves "determining what types of things they can remember and what types of things they can't." Her focus has settled on the latter because she has found that children have difficulty reporting what a person looks like, an obvious impediment to effective courtroom testimony. After investigating techniques used in helping people identify suspects in criminal cases, she found none that were appropriate for children. The traditional Ident-A-Kit requires the user to subjectively create composite images of suspects from transparencies of facial features, and it has a poor record of accuracy, particularly when used by children, she says. Her lineup kit includes eight characteristics--including hair color, eye color, weight and height--to aid children in giving descriptions of persons they don't know. Rather than verbalize their descriptions, children can select pictures of, for instance, blue eyes, or use lines on a wall to approximate height. "It gives them something concrete to point to, which we felt would help them," Schwartz-Kenney said. She says the new techniques still provide only a general description that is useful in narrowing the field of suspects. "In reporting what a stranger looked like, it would at least give the legal system some information on who can be eliminated. It won't draw a picture," she said. Schwartz-Kenney received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from SUNY-Buffalo in 1991. Her interest in the field began, she says, as an undergraduate. "At Colby I took a Jan Plan course on human factor psychology--it's a lot about how people work together--which gave me a better idea of the kind of psychology I wanted to work in," she said. "My honors paper at Colby dealt with eyewitness testimony, so that also was an interest of mine." Recently she has been researching children's understanding of secrecy, which may help draw out the testimony of children who have witnessed an event but been asked not to talk about it by the perpetrator. "What happens is that often the children are keeping the information to themselves and then eventually reporting it. Defense lawyers then can say that their story is not credible because they have contradicted themselves," she said. "I find that [area of research] intriguing because it deals with children's understanding of the mind, how their mind works and how other people's minds are different from their own," she said. "It gets more at the theory of cognitive psychology."--Kevin Cool