14 - cognitive interview Flashcards
what have findings concerning the unreliability of eye witness accounts led researches to do?
attempt to devise methods for improving retrieval technique
who came up with the cognitive interview?
fisher and geiselman
define the cognitive interview
a questioning technique used by the police to enhance retrieval of information about a crime scene from the eyewitnesses and victims memories
why are there a number of ways our memories can be accessed?
our memories are made up of a network of associations rather than discrete and unconnected events
how does the cognitive interview exploit our memory?
using multiple retrieval strategies
how did fisher and geiselman argue that ewt can be improved?
if the police used different techniques, using information on memory to improve strategies (cognitive interviews)
what are the four parts to a cognitive interview?
context reinstatement (mentally visualising yourself back in the incident), report everything (no matter how trivial), reverse order (recall incident backwards and forwards in time) and changed perspective (recall incident from a different view point)
describe the enhanced cognitive interview
the interviewer needs to know when to establish eye contact and when to leave it. they should also try to minimise anxiety and ask open ended questions
what does reporting everything trigger?
important memories
what type of retrieval failure is reinstating the context relating to?
context dependent forgetting
what can reversing the order prevent?
people reporting what they expected to see and people lying as it is harder for people to lie if they are making a story up
what does changing perspective stop people reporting?
what they expect to see rather than what they actually saw
how is the complexity of cognitive interview a weakness?
police might be reluctant to use is because of the time it takes to cover information in such detail. a standard police interview is much quicker. for cognitive interview to work you must build a rapport with the interviewee and police may also need special training in order to use it
who found that the cognitive interview approach was valuable and how is this a strength?
milne and bull found the cognitive interview approach was valuable but the first two (reporting the details and returning to the scene in your mind) was much more valuable than the other points. strength because just by using these two techniques it can dramatically improve cognitive interview
