Stephen Charman

Stephen earned his B. S. Psychology (Honours) from Queen's University in Kingston, Canada and later his M.S. and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Iowa State University (Ames, Iowa).

Research Areas

Dr. Charman's primary research interests lie mainly in the area of eyewitness psychology, but cover legal psychological issues more broadly. Specifically, his research topics include: the underlying cognitive processes of eyewitnesses; various lineup procedures that may improve eyewitness performance; the effectiveness of age-progression techniques; the forensic usefulness (and dangers) of facial composites; and the processes by which crime suspects generate alibis (and how those alibis are subsequently evaluated). His research has been published in book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and scientific journal articles, including Law and Human Behavior, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Applied Cognitive Psychology, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, and Current Directions in Psychological Science. He currently maintains a legal psychology lab that involves numerous undergraduate and graduate students. He hopes that his work will help improve the accuracy of criminal trial verdicts, which, as recent DNA exoneration cases have shown, can be tragically mistaken.