A study com­par­ing the effects of var­i­ous leisure activ­i­ties on the recog­ni­tion and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of faces has con­cluded that eye­wit­nesses should not be per­mit­ted to do cryp­tic cross­word puz­zles prior to an iden­tity parade.

The study, con­ducted by Cardiff University’s Michael Lewis, com­pared logic puz­zles (sudoku), cross­word puz­zles (both cryp­tic and stan­dard) and mys­tery nov­els (Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) and found that per­form­ing cryp­tic cross­words reduced the reli­a­bil­ity of recog­nis­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing faces.

“The iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of an offender by a wit­ness to a crime often forms an impor­tant ele­ment of a prosecution’s case. While con­sid­er­able impor­tance is placed by jurors on the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the offender by a wit­ness (such as a sus­pect being picked out from an iden­tity parade), research tells us that these iden­ti­fi­ca­tions can often be wrong and some­times lead to wrong­ful convictions.”

“It would be unde­sir­able,” he writes, “to have wit­nesses doing some­thing before an iden­tity parade that would make them worse at pick­ing out the offender … Con­sider what wit­nesses may do before an iden­tity parade. It is pos­si­ble that they might be doing some­thing to pass the time (eg read or do a puz­zle). It is pos­si­ble that some of these poten­tial activ­i­ties may lead to a detri­ment in face processing.”

via @noahWG