Abstract
Witness testimony plays a critical role in many criminal cases. When crimes occur under conditions that prevent traditional eyewitness observations, auditory observations from earwitnesses about what and who they heard can be particularly important for subsequent legal proceedings. However, past research on earwitness memory rarely replicates conditions typical of real-world crimes. Here, we used Virtual Reality (VR) to address this gap in the literature. Participants (n = 87) were individually exposed to a VR height simulation in which they were required to walk across a plank suspended 80 stories above the ground. During the height challenge, they heard a male voice deliver a verbal threat to their safety. The following day, participants’ memory of the message and the speaker was assessed. We also examined whether participants’ memory performance was influenced by their subjective (self-reported fear and anxiety) and physiological (heart rate) levels of stress, measured in real-time. Overall, participants were able to answer some recognition (yes/no) questions about the speaker and the message, but they struggled with freely recalling details and identifying the voice from a lineup. While individual differences in stress had a limited association with memory performance, voice identification and recognition accuracy—particularly for yes/no questions about true elements of an experience—showed some signs of impairment as stress levels increased. Our findings add to a small body of work suggesting that criminal justice professionals should approach “earwitness” evidence in stranger-perpetrated crimes with considerable caution.