Eye Remember What Happened: Eye-Closure Improves Recall of Events but not Face Recognition ANNELIES VREDEVELDT 1,2 *, COLIN G. TREDOUX 1 , KATE KEMPEN 1 and ALICIA NORTJE 1 1 Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa 2 Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands Summary: Eye-closure improves event recall. We investigated whether eye-closure can also facilitate subsequent performance on lineup identification (Experiment 1) and face recognition tasks (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants viewed a theft, recalled the event with eyes open or closed, mentally rehearsed the perpetrator’s face with eyes open or closed, and viewed a target-present or target-absent lineup. Eye-closure improved event recall, but did not significantly affect lineup identification accuracy. Experiment 2 employed a face recognition paradigm with high statistical power to permit detection of potentially small effects. Participants viewed 20 faces and were later asked to recognize the faces. Thirty seconds before the recognition task, participants either completed an unrelated distracter task (control condition), or were instructed to think about the face with their eyes open (rehearsal condition) or closed (eye-closure condition). We found no differences between conditions in discrimination accuracy or response criterion. Potential explanations and practical implications are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Incorrect eyewitness testimony has played an important role in the majority of known wrongful convictions (Gross & Shaffer, 2012). Although some of these eyewitness errors involved deliberate deception, the majority of errors were due to eyewitnesses who were genuinely mistaken. Many procedures have been developed to help eyewitnesses—some aimed at improving memory retrieval processes during investigative interviews (e.g. the Cognitive Interview; Fisher & Geiselman, 1992; for meta-analyses see Köhnken, Milne, Memon, & Bull, 1999; Memon, Meissner, & Fraser, 2010), and some aimed at improving lineup identification accuracy (e.g. double-blind administration of lineups; Greathouse & Kovera, 2009; see also Clark, 2012). Several authors recently showed that a very simple procedure—instructing witnesses to close their eyes during the interview—improves retrieval of accurate information about witnessed events (e.g. Perfect et al., 2008; Vredeveldt, Baddeley, & Hitch, 2014; Wagstaff et al., 2004). An important question that has not yet been answered, however, is whether eye-closure can also improve facial identification accuracy. Researchers and policy makers are constantly looking for ways to facilitate facial identification —hence, the present research investigates whether eye-closure during mental rehearsal of a perpetrator’s face can improve subsequent lineup identification accuracy (Experiment 1) and face recognition performance (Experiment 2). Eye-closure seems to be associated with at least two cogni- tive benefits: concentration and visualization. When people have their eyes closed, they are better able to concentrate on difficult cognitive tasks. This phenomenon was first demon- strated by Glenberg, Schroeder, and Robertson (1998), who found that people are more likely to spontaneously close their eyes or avert their gaze when completing more difficult tasks. Moreover, they found that participants instructed to close their eyes performed better on mathematical and general- knowledge questions. Similarly, children perform better on a wide range of cognitive tasks when they are instructed to close their eyes or look away (e.g. Doherty-Sneddon, Bonner, & Bruce, 2001; Phelps, Doherty-Sneddon, & Warnock, 2006). Further support for the idea that eye-closure improves general concentration comes from work showing that eye- closure helps participants to overcome the cross-modal memory impairment caused by auditory distraction (Perfect, Andrade, & Eagan, 2011). These combined findings may be explained in terms of Glenberg’s (1997) embodied cognition account, which construes environmental monitoring and memory retrieval as two concurrent tasks competing for cognitive resources. When a person disengages from the environment (e.g. through eye-closure), more cognitive resources are available for the memory retrieval task, thus enhancing performance. The working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) predicts that concurrent tasks in the same modality interfere more with each other than tasks in different modalities. Much evidence has accumulated in support of the modality-specific interference hypothesis (for an overview see Baddeley, 2007). Of particular relevance to the current research is that visual tasks have been found to disrupt the vividness of visual imagery, but not auditory imagery (Baddeley & Andrade, 2000). This suggests that cutting out visual distractions through eye-closure should be particularly helpful for retrieving visual information from memory, which is what several studies have found (e.g.Perfect et al., 2008, Experiment 2; Vredeveldt, Baddeley, & Hitch, 2012; 2014; but see Perfect et al., 2008, Experiment 4 and 5). The idea that eye-closure facilitates visualization is further supported by findings that closing the eyes increases mental simulation of hypothetical events (Caruso & Gino, 2011) and improves performance on tasks requiring visual imagery (Rode, Revol, Rossetti, Boisson, & Bartolomeo, 2007). Indeed, individuals who keep their eyes closed during memory retrieval exhibit activity in brain regions associated with visual imagery (Wais & Gazzaley, 2014; Wais, Rubens, Boccanfuso, & Gazzaley, 2010). In sum, eye-closure improves recall perfor- mance through a combination of enhanced concentration and visualization (see also Vredeveldt, Hitch, & Baddeley, 2011; Vredeveldt & Perfect, 2014). *Correspondence to: Annelies Vredeveldt, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Law, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: anneliesvredeveldt@gmail.com Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2015) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.3092