EWT: Cognitive Interview Flashcards
Cognitive Interview
Proposal
- Eyewitness testimony could be improved if the police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses.
- They recommended such techniques should be based on psychological insights on how memory works.
Cognitive Interview
1, Report Everything
- Witnesses are encourage to recall every single detail about the event, even if it may seem irrelevent or if they don’t feel confident about it.
- ## Seemingly trivial details may be important and they may trigger other important memories.
Cognitive Interview
2, Reinstate the Context
- The witness should return to the original crime scene in their mind.
- They should imagine the environment (e.g. the weather, what they could see), and their emotions (e.g. happy, bored).
- This is related to context-dependent forgetting.
Cognitive Interview
3, Reverse the Order
- Witnesses should be encouraged to replay the events out of chronological order.
- For example, from the final event to the beginning, from the middle to the beginning, etc.
- This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event may have played out, rather than reporting actual events.
- It also prevents dishonesty: it’s harder to produce an untruthful count if they have to reverse it.
Cognitive Interview
4, Change Perspective
- Witnesses should attempt to recall the events from another point of view (e.g. how it happened for another witness, the perpetrator).
- This is done to disrupt the impact of schema on recall.
- The schema for a particular setting may generate expections for what happened and this is recalled instead of the real events.
Cognitive Interview
Enhanced Cognitive Interview
- Fisher (1987) developed some additional elements of the CI to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction.
- For example, the interviewer needs to know when to establish eye contact and when to relinquish it.
- The ECI also includes reducing anxiety, minimising distractions and getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions.
Cognitive Interview: Evaluation
Support for the Effectiveness of the CI
Strength
- There is evidence that CI works.
- A meta-analysis combined data of 55 studies comparing CI (and ECI) with the standard police interview.
- The CI gave an average 41% increase in accurate information compared with the standard interview.
- Only four studies in this analysis showed no difference between types of interview.
This shows that the CI is an effective technique in helping witnesses recall information that is stored in memory, but isn’t immediately accessible.
Cognitive Interview: Evaluation
Counterpoint
(Support for the Effectiveness of CI)
- The meta-analysis also found an increase in the amount of inaccurate information recalled by participants.
- This was a particular issue in the ECI, which produced more inaccurate results than CI.
- Cognitive interviews may sacrifice the quality of EWT, in favour of quantity.
This means that police officers should treat eyewitness evidence from CI/ECI with caution.
Cognitive Interview: Evaluation
Some Elements may be more Useful
Limitation
- Not all elements of the original CI are equally effective or useful.
- Milne and Bull found that each of the four techniques alone produced more information than the standard police interviews.
- But they also 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 confirmed police officers’ suspicions that some aspects of CI are more useful than others.
This casts some doubt on the credibility of the overall cognitive interview.
Cognitive Interview: Evaluation
CI is Time-consuming
- Police officers may be more reluctant to use CI because it takes more time and training than the standard police interview.
- For example, more time is needed to build a rapport with the witness and allow them to relax.
- CI also requires special training and many forces do not have the resources to provide more than a few hours.
This suggests that the complete CI as it exists is not a realistic method for police officers to use and it may be better to focus on the key elements.
