Taking the law into your hands: the impact of attention and nonverbal memory on the gestural misinformation effect

Eyewitness testimonies, a prominent form of legal system evidence, are often flawed. Gestural misinformation effects occur when witnesses misremember events after seeing gestures conveying false information. Stronger memories may be less vulnerable to suggestion. Therefore, factors that increase memory strength, e.g., nonverbal memory capacity and attention, may mitigate misinformation effects. University students (N = 93) were told to pay attention or received no attention instructions before watching a confederate perform a series of actions. Participants were then questioned, with questions accompanied by accurate or misleading gestures, or no gestures, followed by a nonverbal memory test. Correct answers were more likely after viewing accurate gestures than misleading or no gestures. Participants instructed to pay attention gave more correct answers and were misled by gestural misinformation at lower rates than participants not instructed to pay attention. Results suggest gestures can impact eyewitness testimonies, especially if the witness was not paying attention to the crime.