Misinformation exposure has been known to affect eyewitness testimony due to the malleability of memory, but little is known about cultural influences. The current study investigated eyewitness accounts from individuals from different cultures. In session one, Australian and Chinese mock witnesses watched one of two versions of a theft, where the cultural background of the perpetrator was manipulated (Australian vs Chinese). Eye movements were tracked to investigate any perceptual differences between the two groups. In session two one week later, they received misinformation about the theft through an image, where the misinformation items were either central or background details. Finally, participants completed a free recall, cued recall, and source memory task, also providing confidence ratings for each answer. The findings will be discussed, which will have implications on interview expectations when investigators encounter eyewitnesses from different cultures.

We speak of double misinformation when there are two misleading details concerning the same original detail. For example, somebody’s blue eyes may be described by one witness as green and by a second witness as brown.

Yet, little is known about how double, compared to single misinformation affects memory reports’ accuracy. Previous research suggests that the impact of double misinformation on remembering may be determined by misinformation availability (i.e. the encoding and subsequent accessibility of misleading information).

In the first study directly testing this prediction, we presented participants with either double or single misinformation and independently manipulated misinformation availability. Although experimental manipulations did not produce all expected differences between conditions, we found evidence for misinformation availability as a determinant of double misinformation processing.

Susceptibility to misinformation introduced via co-witness narratives has been extensively studied using single-event paradigms. This study introduces a novel focus on linguistic characteristics of co-witness narratives in repeated-event contexts. In a preregistered experiment, we compared misinformation rates for reports of an instance of a repeated event after exposure to a misinformation narrative presented by a native (L1) vs. non-native (L2) speaker of English. Participants studied four videos (undercover missions) and then listened to a narrative summary of the first (target) mission produced by a fictitious team member with a native Australian (L1) or German (L2) accent. The narrative included correct details and misinformation. Participants completed free recall, cued recall, and recognition tests, a vocabulary test, and a linguistic background questionnaire. Preliminary results suggest higher accuracy after exposure to the L2 than the L1 narrative. Planned analyses will assess accuracy relative to participants’ exposure to accented speech and perceived speaker comprehensibility.

How do we determine whether non-remembered events actually occurred? People rely partially on memorability judgments: if the events seem memorable, we infer that they didn't happen, but if they seem unmemorable we consider it possible they were forgotten. Errors in this inferential process are crucial to false belief and memory formation. We conducted a series of experiments in which participants studied pictures, then completed an old/new recognition test wherein some of the previously unseen pictures were falsely labeled as ‘old’. We found that participants rated new pictures as less memorable when falsely told they had seen them before, and this was especially true for more-memorable pictures. We therefore extended our investigation by examining how pictures’ emotionality and individuals’ emotional states moderated this effect. We conclude that false suggestions can shift people’s reasoning from “I’d remember this, if it had happened” toward “I don’t remember, so it must be forgettable.”