A perpetrator's accent impairs witnesses' memory for physical appearance

Kerri L. Pickel, Joshua B. Staller
2011 Law and Human Behavior  
Sometimes witnesses to crimes must remember both a perpetrator's appearance and voice. Drawing upon multiple resource theory as well as previous findings that processing foreign-accented speech is more demanding than processing unaccented speech, we hypothesized that a perpetrator's accent can impair memory for his or her appearance. In Experiment 1, we used a secondary visual search task to demonstrate that processing an accented versus unaccented message demands more cognitive resources. In
more » ... o additional experiments, we extended that result by showing that witnesses trying to encode information spoken by a perpetrator with an accent rather than no accent provided poorer physical descriptions of him and identified his voice less accurately. We also found that witnesses who heard a more versus less detailed message reported fewer correct details about the perpetrator's appearance (Experiment 2), and a more rather than less threatening message led to less accurate descriptions (Experiment 3).
doi:10.1007/s10979-011-9263-7 fatcat:dpe52ildija2rbwup7kmxlt2rq