Improving Accuracy of EWT - Cognitive Interview

Question 1

Cognitive interview (CI)

Answer 1

A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories. It has 4 main techniques based on psychological evidence - report everything, reinstate the context, reverse the order, change perspective

Question 2

Who proposed the CI?

Answer 2

Fisher and Geiselman (1992)

Question 3

Report everything

Answer 3

Witnesses are encouraged to include every detail as seemingly trivial details may be important or trigger other memories

Question 4

Reinstate the context

Answer 4

Witnesses return to the original scene in their mind, imagining their environment and emotions. Related to context-dependant forgetting

Question 5

Reverse the order

Answer 5

Events recalled in a different order to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must of occurred or dishonesty

Question 6

Change perspective

Answer 6

Witnesses recall the incident from someone else’s perspective to disrupt the effect of expectations and schema on recall

Question 7

Enhanced cognitive interview (ECI)

Answer 7

Cognitive interviews with additional elements focussing on social dynamics (eg. Eye contact, open-ended questions, distractions)

Question 8

Strengths of the cognitive interview

Answer 8

• Empirical evidence suggesting it improves EWT (eg. Kohnken meta-analysis found CI produced 61% more correct information than SI)
• Reinstate context and report everything works best (eg. Milne & Bull found this works best, helping improve SI)

Question 9

Limitations of the cognitive interview

Answer 9

• Contradictory research (eg. Kohnken also found 81% increase incorrect information)
• Time consuming and expensive (eg. Specialist training required and different for children as their perspective is more egocentric)