Improving Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimonies: Cognitive Interviews Flashcards
what are the 4 techniques used in cognitive interviews?
- report everything
- reinstate the context
- reverse the order
- change perspective
what is report everything?
- witness encouraged to include every single detail of event
- tell me everything
what is reinstate the context?
- return to original crime scene in their mind and imagine the environment and emotions
- relates to context-dependent forgetting
what is reverse the order?
- events recalled in different order from the original sequence
- e.g back to front, from middle
why is reverse the order used?
prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than reporting actual events
what is change perspective?
- witnesses should recall events from other people’s perspective
- e.g. other witnesses or perpetrator
why do we change the perspective?
- disrupt effect of expectations and effect of schemas on recall
what an enhanced cognitive interview?
- developed some additional elements of the CI to focus on social dynamics of interaction
- e.g. interviewer has to know when to establish eye contact and relinquish it
what does an enhanced CI include?
- ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions and getting the witness to speak slowly and ask open-ended questions
what are the evaluations of improving accuracy of EWT?
+ evidence that cognitive interviews work
–> meta analysis of 55 studies done by Kohnken which compared CI and ECI to standard police interviews. found that CI gave a 41% increase in accurate information that the standard police interview, this therefore shows that CI are effective
- not all elements of CI are equally effective or useful
–> Milne and Bull found that each of the 4 techniques alone produced more information than the standard police interview. They also found that report everything and reinstate the context produced better recall that any other elements or combination of them
- CI are time consuming the standard police interview
–> Kebbell and Wagstaff say that SI requires special training and many police forces may not have resources to provide more than a few hours and more time is needed to establish rapport with a witness and allow them to relax
name the researchers involved in improving the accuracy of EWT.
Fisher and Geiselman
what did Fisher and Geiselman argue?
they argued that eyewitness testimonies could be improved if police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses
what are the techniques based on according to Fisher and Geiselman?
- psychological insights into how memory works
who created the enhanced cognitive interview?
Fisher et al
