Lab & Team Mascot

Dr. Jacl

Long before donning the trademark white coat, Dr. Jacl was just a desert jackal with an inconvenient gift: Jacl could recognize faces better than most humans, remember every detail of every stranger he ever met, and spot an unfairness in life from a mile away.

According to lab mythology, Dr. Jacl's academic career began the day Jacl wandered onto a university campus, walked straight into a Cognitive Psychology lecture, and never left.

From there, Dr. Jacl earned a reputation:

Master of memory,

Defender of fair lineups,
Unpaid emotional support character for stressed-out RAs,
And occasional menace to make things fun.

After years of unofficial consulting, the Jones Applied Cognition Lab finally gave Jacl an honorary doctorate and a permanent home. Now Dr. Jacl watches over experiments, oversees quality control for his brand, and reminds the team that science should be curious, bold, and just a little mischievous.

If you hear scratching in the data room late at night—don’t worry. It’s just Dr. Jacl double-checking stimuli spreadsheets for counterbalancing errors.

Dr. Jacl's Ongoing Case - Part 1

🚨‼️ BREAKING NEWS ‼️🚨

August, 12, 2025

At 11:07 AM this morning, the local Pawlice Department was called about a crime in progress. A potential PURRpetrator walked into the bookstore down the street and walked out without paying for a rare copy of the original version of the book Memory & Mind!

The JACL Team just got word that our beloved Dr. Jacl was brought in by detectives as a suspect in this crime 😱😰😳 But, we know OUR team leader is innocent! Dr. Jacl may be mischievous in her quest for knowledge but never a thief!! Buckle up and stay tuned for updates as we fight to protect and prevent having to exonerate Dr. Jacl for wrongful conviction!!

Over the next few months, we will be providing updates about Dr. Jacl's case! In doing so, we'll be pointing out procedural issues with gathering eyewitness evidence using Dr. Jacl's case, and we'll try to help educate you on the mission of our lab and importance of eyewitness memory and identification research!

Dr. Jacl's Ongoing Case - Part 2

🚨‼️ BREAKING NEWS ‼️🚨

October 2025

Case #: CJ-8119

Reporting Officer: Sgt. Barkson, Pawlice Dept.

Eyewitness 2 Description (verbatim): “Uh... medium-sized... brown fur...maybe male? Average age? ... Oh! And definitely wearing big, nerdy glasses.”

That’s it. That’s the entire description!

Sounds vague? Sure. But in eyewitness science, vague descriptors aren’t always bad. Why? When detectives build lineups, they need fillers (the non-suspects) to put in the lineup, so they use two main approaches to select these individuals:

1️⃣ Suspect-matched: make the fillers look like the suspect

2️⃣ Description-matched: make the fillers match the witness’s description

Dr. Jones and her collaborators’ conducted a study in 2019, showing that when building lineups, vague descriptions can actually make a difference—description-matched fillers lineups led to higher discriminability for guilty and innocent suspects. Suspect-matched ones contained fillers with high degrees of similarity-clones, which probably led to the ID task becoming more difficult.

See Carlson et al. (2019a) below:

But, what about distinctive teal glasses? Do we leave them on, take them off, or give everyone glasses? If the PURRpetrator was described wearing them during the crime, Dr. Jones and colleagues found evidence of a boost in eyewitness’s ability to discriminate between innocent and guilty when factors (i.e., glasses) are as similar as possible between the crime itself and the lineup ID task. We also found evidence suggesting the importance of internal facial features, so the Pawlice may want to ensure all lineup members have glasses, but we’ll see what they do!

See Carlson et al. (2019b) below:

We’ve also found evidence in support of the claim that you only need 2 description matched filers with the suspect to produce better ID performance!

See Carlson et al. (2020) below:

Dr. Jacl's Ongoing Case - Part 3

🚨‼️ BREAKING NEWS ‼️🚨

December 2025
Case #: CJ-8119

The Pawlice finally released the lineup they used in Dr. Jacl’s case.

And… the lineup practically pointed at Dr. Jacl.

Exhibit A: The Distinctive Glasses Disaster

Remember the eyewitness description?

“Uh... medium-sized... brown fur...maybe male? Average age? ... Oh! And definitely wearing big, nerdy glasses.”

So you’d think the Pawlice would handle the glasses carefully—because you literally warned them this was the key issue: leave them on, take them off, or give everyone glasses?

Well… they chose a secret fourth option:

✅ Only ONE lineup member has the distinctive teal glasses
✅ And wouldn’t you know it — that one is Dr. Jacl.

Why this matters (aka how unfair lineups happen). When only one person has the standout feature the witness mentioned, the task quietly shifts from:

“Do you recognize the PURRpetrator?”

to
“Which one matches the description?” That’s how an identification becomes more about guessing the “best match” than recognizing the culprit.

What the Pawlice should have done to keep the lineup fair:

Put similar glasses on everyone, OR
Put no glasses on anyone, OR
Use fillers selected so the suspect doesn’t pop out as the obvious choice

What happens next…

The witness is scheduled to view the lineup again next week. And if Sgt. Barkson does what Sgt. Barkson usually does, we may be headed straight into the next classic problem: confidence inflation after the ID. 😬

Stay tuned.

See Jones et al. 2020

Stay tuned for the lineup reveal & Dr. Jacl's case's legal proceedings

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