Cognitive Interview Flashcards
What is the cognitive interview
It takes into account psychological findings about cue-dependent forgetting and has four stages designed to stimulate as many cues as possible in order to maximize different retrieval routes.
Who developed the cognitive interview?
Geiselman developed the Cognitive Interview (CI) as an alternative to the Standard Interview.
What are the four steps for the cognitive interview?
1) Report everything
2) Reinstate the context
3) Reverse the order
4) Change perspective
What does step one of the cognitive interview suggest?
1) Report everything
Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even though it seem irrelevant, or the witness doesn’t feel confident about it. Seemingly trivial details may be important, and they trigger other important memories.
What does step two of the cognitive interview suggest?
2) Reinstate the context
The witness should return to the original crime scene ‘in their mind’ and imagine the environment (such as what the weather was like, what they could see) and their emotions. This is related to context-dependent forgetting.
What does step three of the cognitive interview suggest?
3) 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. This s done to prevent reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events. It also prevents dishonesty.
What does step four of the cognitive interview suggest?
4) Change perspective
Witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s perspectives, 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.
Research Support for cognitive interview: Geiselman (1985), Method
Method: Participants viewed a film of a violent crime and, after 48 hours, were interviewed by a policeman using one of three methods: the cognitive interview; a standard interview used by the Los Angeles Police; or an interview using hypnosis. The number of facts accurately recalled, and the number of errors made were recorded.
Research Support for cognitive interview: Geiselman (1985), Reults
Results: The average number of correctly recalled facts for the cognitive interview was 41.2, for hypnosis it was 38.0 and for the standard interview it was 29.4. There was no significant difference in the number of errors in each condition.
Who developed the enhanced cognitive interview?
Fisher et al (1987) developed some additional elements of the cognitive interview to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction and to build a trusting relationship.
What were the additions fisher added to the enhanced cognitive interview?
Interviewer not distracting the witness
Witness controlling flow of information
Asking open-ended questions
Getting the witness to speak slowly
Participants being reminded not to guess and use the ‘don’t know’ option to reduce confabulations (false memories)
Is the enhanced interview better? Proof?
Research suggests that the ECI may offer special benefits. Researchers combined data from 50 studies (meta-analysis) and found that the ECI consistently provided more correct information than the standard interview by police.
This indicates that there are real practical benefits to the police using the enhanced version of the CI and gives the police a greater chance of catching and charging criminals which is beneficial to society as a whole.
Limitations of the cognitive interview? (time)
A limitation of the cognitive interview is that it is time consuming because it takes much more time than the standard police interview.
For example, more time is needed to establish rapport with the witness and allow them to relax. The CI also required special training and many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours of this.
This means that it is unlikely that the ‘proper’ version of the CI is actually used, which may explain why police have not been that impressed by it.
What is a strength of the cognitive approach?
A further strength is that each element/stage of the cognitive interview is equally as valuable.
Milne & Bull (2002) found that each technique (even when used separately) produced more information than the standard interview. However, they did find that using a combination of report everything and context reinforcement produced better recall than the others.
This suggests that at least two of the elements should be used to improve police interviewing of eyewitnesses even if the full CI isn’t used.
What is a limitation of the cognitive interview? Incorrect info
A limitation is that the techniques of the cognitive interview also encourages the recall of incorrect information.
Kohnken et al (1999) found an 81% increase of correct information but also a 61% increase of incorrect information (false positives) when the enhanced CI was compared to a standard interview.
But it is argued that the fact that the CI leads to an increase in inaccurate recall is a good reason to find ways of improving the CI, not abandoning it. Also, the CI does produce more accurate recall as well, and in fact this outweighs any increase in inaccurate information.
