Improving Accuracy Of EWT: Cognitive(M) Flashcards
Define cognitive interview?
Methods used to help eyewitnesses retrieve accurate memories
Who carried an experiment on interview and what did they argue?
Fisher and Geiselman (1992)
Argued that EWT could be improved if police hard better techniques when interviewing witnesses
What were the four main techniques that Fisher and Geiselman used?
1) report everything
2) reinstate context
3) reverse the order
4) change respective
Why is it important to report everything?
Even though it may seem irrelevant or trivial detail it may trigger memories
Why is it important to reinstate the context?
The crime sense ‘in the mind’ imagine environment, emotions ect. Related to context dependent forgetting
Why is it important to reverse the order?
Recall in different chronological order, this prevents people reporting their expectations of an event and dishonesty
Why is it important to change respective?
Looking at how others involved in the incident would have viewed t from their POV helps prevent people telling an inaccurate account of the story and the ‘schéma’ or recall
What is ECI?
Enhanced cognitive interview and includes ideas such as reducing anxiety, minimising distractions, getting witnesses to speak slower and open ended questions
What did fisher et al (1987) suggest about ECI?
When interviewing need to establish/ relinquish eye contact
What is a limitation of cognitive interviewing? (Evaluation)
It’s more time consuming than standard police interviewing
More time needed to establish rapport along with special training and police forces are unable to provide these hours (Kebbel and Wagstaff 1996)
Unlikely that proper version of CI is used
Why are some elements more valuable than others (evaluation)?
Milne and Bull (2002)
Found each independent element equally volatile
Each technique used singly produced more information than the SI
Combination of report everything and context reinstatement produced the best recall
Some CI’s are more useful than others
Shows that even just two elements help police and increase credibility of police officers
What is the support for effectiveness of CI (evaluation)?
Kohnken et all (1999)- meta analysis
Combined data from 50 studied and found ECI Information was correct more than the SPI
Showing that the real practical benefits of using ECI as the police have a greater chance of catching criminals and this benefits society as a whole
What supports that CI increases inaccurate information (evaluation)?
Kohnken et al (1999)
81% increase of correct information
61% chance of incorrect information when using enhance CI
