Misidentifications of innocent individuals in photospread lineups may arise from faulty assessments by eyewitnesses of their levels of perceptual or contextual knowledge about a target person. Eyewitness memory research has generally placed the burden of the responsibility for misidentifications on the first of these; that is, when witnesses have inadequate levels of perceptual knowledge. In contrast, for the “unconscious transference” type of misidentification it has been argued that an innocent bystander has been misidentified, not because perceptual knowledge or the sense of familiarity that arose from it was inadequate, but because the witness relied on this knowledge to the neglect of other, contextual, information. As a result, a level of perceived familiarity normally adequate for a recognition decision alone also served as the basis for an identification decision.

The present chapter maintains this distinction between recognition and identification decisions and asks what additional information accompanies the witness’ shift from a recognition to an identification decision, and to what extent perceived familiarity is the basis for one or both of these decisions. Analyses of our subjects’ responses collected prior to an identification task suggested that their misidentifications were based on a combination of perceived familiarity, contextual recall, and the use of conscious inferential processes that provided a rationale for the selection of the most plausible lineup member. In short, the identification task was perhaps seen by our subject-witnesses as a problem to be solved, one in which a decision was arrived at by assessing the relative plausibility as well as the relative similarity (compare Lindsay & Johnson, 1989; Wells, 1984; 1992) of each lineup member.