Abstract
Technological advances offer possibilities for innovation in the way eyewitness testimony is elicited. Typically, this occurs face-to-face. We investigated whether a virtual environment, where interviewer and eyewitness communicate as avatars, might confer advantages by attenuating the social and situational demands of a face-to-face interview, releasing more cognitive resources for invoking episodic retrieval mode. In conditions of intentional encoding, eyewitnesses were interviewed 48 h later, either face-to-face or in a virtual environment (N = 38). Participants in the virtual environment significantly outperformed those interviewed face-to-face on all episodic performance measures – improved correct reporting reduced errors, and increased accuracy. Participants reported finding it easier to admit not remembering event information to the avatar, and finding the avatar easier to talk to. These novel findings, and our pattern of retrieval results indicates the potential of avatar-to-avatar communication in virtual environments, and provide impetus for further research investigating eyewitness cognition in contemporary retrieval contexts.
Highlights
Technological innovations offer exciting possibilities for changes in practice within the criminal justice system
We investigated episodic memory performance using the mock witness memory paradigm across two contexts – a traditional face-to-face context, and a computer-mediated context
Typically developing children, and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder recalled more information when interviewed by an avatar than a human (Hsu and Teoh, 2017), and remote interviews via Skype have been found to increase the amount of event relevant information vs. a traditional face-to-face context (Nash et al, 2014; Hamilton et al, 2017)
Summary
Technological innovations offer exciting possibilities for changes in practice within the criminal justice system. Witnesses provide information about personal experiences within a specific context (Tulving and Thomson, 1973), which requires conscious recollection and is contingent on a type of mental set referred to as episodic ‘retrieval mode’ (Burgess et al, 2002; Tulving, 2002; Roediger et al, 2014). Witness information is typically collected during a face-to-face interview (e.g., Ministry of Justice (MOJ), 2011; Cooper and Norton, 2017), and so for witnesses, episodic retrieval mode occurs within a social environment. Witnesses complete a series of complex cognitive operations to activate episodic retrieval (e.g., Tulving and Thomson, 1973; Schacter et al, 1997), which requires effort and concentration, because unlike semantic memory, for example, episodic retrieval is not automatic.
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