Cognitive Interview

Question 1

What is a cognitive interview?

Answer 1

This is a police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crime, which encourages them to recreate the original context in order to increase the accessibility of stored information.

Question 2

What is a schema?

Answer 2

• Pre-conceived ideas about the world based on shared knowledge and/or past experiences.
• Used as shortcuts by the mind to fill in gaps in memory
• This can corrupt EWT.
• CI helps to reduce this by using cues to help retrieve accurate information.

Question 3

Fisher and Geiselman (1992)

Answer 3

• Reviewed memory literature - people remember things better if they are provided with retrieval cues.
• The technique they devised had 4 components:

Question 4

Report Everything

Answer 4

The interviewer encourages the reporting of every single detail of the event without editing anything out, even though it may seem irrelevant.

Memories are interconnected with one another so that a recollection of one item may then clue other memories. Small details may be eventually pieced together with other witnesses’.

Question 5

Mental reinstatement out of context

Answer 5

The interviewer encourages the interviewee to mentally recreate both the physical and psychological environment of the original incident.

Aim to make memories more accessible. To access some memories, you can make appropriate contextual and emotional cues.

Question 6

Change Order

Answer 6

Trying alternative ways through the timeline of the incident such as reversing the order in which events occurred. This is because our recollections are influenced by schemas so if we are questioned on said timelines differently, we will not use said schemas.

Question 7

Change perspective

Answer 7

The interviewee is asked to recall the incident from multiple perspectives such as other witnesses. This is done to disrupt these schemas and their affect on recall.

Question 8

Limitations of CI

Answer 8

P - issues with the use of CI in real life
E - Kebell & Wagstaff - inconsistent use of CI due to pressures of solving cases, lack of training and funding.
E - difficulty to assess the real effectiveness of the technique

P - Quality of information may not be improved
E = Kohnken - meta-analysis found that CI produced 85% correct information. However, also found a 61% increase in incorrect information

Question 9

Strengths of CI

Answer 9

P - Usefulness of the CI to help improve the testimony of older witnesses
E - Mello and Fisher - when CI and normal interview techniques were tested on both older adults’ and younger adults’ members, CI was better for both. But was significantly an advantage for the elderly. When using the CI technique, older ppt recalled significantly greater detail without giving any false information.

P - Higher levels of correct information
E - meta-analysis of 53 studies which found an average of 34% of correct information recalled using the basic cognitive interview compared to the standard interviewing techniques.