Oral Presentation: The Way We All Remember: The Influence of Different Cultures on Eyewitness Memory and Investigative Interviewing

Title: The Way We All Remember: The Influence of Different Cultures on Eyewitness Memory and Investigative Interviewing

Abstract: 

Nowadays, more and more people report about their memories in cross-cultural contexts, such as asylum interviews and international criminal cases. That poses challenges, because there are differences in how people from different cultural backgrounds remember and talk about events. We conducted two experiments to examine cultural differences in memory for objects and events, respectively, comparing Sub-Saharan African participants to a matched Western European control group. The first experiment was aimed at object identification and has been completed. We found that African participants were significantly less likely to convert two-dimensional (2D) to three-dimensional (3D) representations and significantly more likely to respond in the affirmative than European participants. In the second experiment, which is ongoing, we move beyond object identification to investigative interviewing about a witnessed event. We will examine differences in free and cued recall of an event (e.g., level and type of detail, accuracy, emotionality, response style), as well as person and object lineup identification performance. Our findings elucidate cultural factors in eyewitness memory and investigative interviewing. In the paper we will elaborate on what cultural differences mean for investigative interviewing of people from different cultures.