Cognitive interview Flashcards
What is the cognitive interview?
A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories.
Who proposed the cognitive interview?
Fisher and Geiselman (1992)
What did Fisher and Geiselman argue?
Eyewitness testimony could be improved if the police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses
What are the four techniques of the cognitive interview?
Report everything
Reinstate the context
Change the order
Change the perspective
What does ‘report everything’ involve?
Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant or the witness doesn’t feel confident.
What theory does ‘report everything’ link to?
Encoding specificity principle - seemingly trivial details may trigger other important memories
What does ‘reinstate the context’ involve?
Recalling the environment and emotional context of the event.
What theory does ‘reinstate the context’ link to?
Cue dependent memory - context cues can aid with recall
What does ‘change of order’ involve?
Recalling the events in a different order from the original sequence of the event
What theory does ‘change of order’ link to?
Schemas - disrupting the schemas which can conform them to pre existing beliefs and expectations
What does ‘change of perspective’ involve?
Witnesses recalling the events from another person’s perspective
What theory does ‘change of perspective’ link to?
Schemas - disrupting the schemas which can conform them to pre existing beliefs and expectations
Evaluation: elements useful / not useful
Limitation - not all elements are equally effective or useful
Milne and Bull (2002) found that using a combination of report everything and reinstate the context produced better recall than any of the other elements or combination of them
This casts some doubt on the credibility of the overall cognitive interview
Evaluation: time
Limitation - time consuming
Take more time and training than standard police interview
Suggests that the complete CI is not realistic
Evaluation: it works
Strength - Kohnken conducted a meta analysis from 55 studies
CI gave an average 41% increase in accurate information
This shows that CI is an effective technique in helping witnesses accurately recall information that is stored in memory but not immediately accessible
