Cognitive Interview Flashcards
Cognitive Interview: (CI)
A method of interviewing EWs to help them retrieve more accurate memories. It uses four main technique, all based on well-established psychological knowledge of human memory- report everything, reinstate the context, reverse the order and change perspective.
Who came up with CI?
Ronald Fisher and Edward Geiselman (1992)
- Report Everything
- Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant or the witness doesn’t feel confident about it.
- Seemingly trivial details may be important and, moreover, they may trigger other important memories.
- Reinstate the context
- The witness should return to the original crime scene in their mind and imagine the environment and their emotions.
- This is related to context-dependent forgetting.
- Reverse the Order
- Events should be recalled in a different chronological order to the original sequence, for example, from the final point back to the beginning or from the middle to the beginning.
- Done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than actual events. It prevents dishonesty.
- Change perspective
- Witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s perspective. For example, how it would have appeared to other witnesses or to the perpetrator.
- This is done to disrupt the effect of expectations and schema on recall.
- The schema you have for a particular setting generate expectations of what happened and it is the schema that is recalled rather than what actually happened.
Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI):
- Fisher et al. (1987) developed some additional elements to the CI to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction.
- For example, the interview needs to known when to establish eye contact and when to relinquish it.
- The ECI also includes ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions.
E: CI is Time-Consuming
- Police may be reluctant to use the CI because it takes much more time than the standard police interview.
- You need more time to establish rapport with hem and allow them to relax.
- The CI also requires special training and many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours (Kebbell and Wagstaff 1996).
- Unlikely that the ‘proper’ version of the CI is actually used, which may explain by police are unimpressed by it.
E: Some elements may be more valuable than others
- Milne and Bull (2002) found that each individual elements was equally valuable. Each technique used singly produced more information than the standard police interview.
- Found that Milne and Bull found that using a combination of report everything and context reinstatement produced better recall than any of the other conditions.
- This confirmed police officers’ suspicions that some aspects of the CI are more useful than others.
- A strength because it suggests at least 2 elements should be used to improve police interviewing of eyewitnesses even if the full CI isn’t used.
- Increases credibility of CI.
E: Support for the Effectiveness of the ECI
- Research suggests that the ECI may offer special benefits.
- Meta-analysis by Kohnken et al. (1999) combined data from 50 studies. The ECI consistently provided more correct information than the standard interview.
- Real practical benefits to the police of using the ECI and gives the police a greater chance of catching and charging criminals.
E: Variations of CI used
Studies of the effectiveness of the CI inevitably use slightly different CI techniques or use the enhanced CI. The same is true in real life- police forces evolve their own methods.
E: CI increases inaccurate information
- The techniques of the CI aim to increase the amount of correct information remembered but the recall of incorrect information may also be increased.
- Kohnken et al.(1999) found an increase 81% of correct information but also an increase of 61% false information compared the standard interview.