Abstract
Criminal investigations often rise and fall on what people remember. Although there is a wealth of research on the strengths and frailties of eyewitness memory, a lack of rigorous research into how people remember stressful experiences makes it difficult for criminal justice professionals and fact-finders to evaluate eyewitness evidence. On the one hand, studies conducted in the laboratory rarely involve exposing participants to memory stimuli that are both personally experienced and stressful. On the other hand, simply asking people about their real-world stressful experiences rarely affords researchers appropriate event homogeneity and a robust measure of accuracy. In this thesis, we examined virtual reality (VR) technology as a novel way to address this quandary. We used a VR height exposure paradigm that has been shown to produce robust stress responses in subjective and physiological terms: participants (n = 73) were asked to walk across a virtual plank suspended 80 storeys above ground. The following day, we examined how well these participants could remember several aspects of their virtual experience, including details of their interaction with the plank itself (e.g., its length and height) and the emotions they had felt. In particular, we were interested in the extent to which subjective measures (real time self-report ratings of fear) and physiological measures (heart rate and skin conductance levels) predicted memory performance. Participants’ memory was relatively poor overall, and there was some evidence that participants’ memory for the details of the simulation was worse at plank-level than at street-level. When investigating associations between individual difference measures and memory performance, however, our analyses yielded mixed findings.