Improving accuracy of eyewitness testimony, including use of cognitive interview Flashcards
Definition of cognitive interview?
A method of interviewing eyewitnesses and victims about what they remember from a crime scene.
What are the 4 main techniques used in the cognitive interview to improve the accuracy of EWT?
Report everything, Reinstate the context, Reverse the order, Change perspective.
Definition of recall everything.
Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail.
Define reverse the order.
The technique asks interviewers to report an event in reverse chronological time order.
Define change perspective.
Recalling the event from the perspective of other people present.
Define reinstate the context.
Visually the witness’s should return to the original crime scene and imagine the environment and their emotions.
Explain what is meant by the enhanced cognitive interview.
The enhanced CI includes more social aspects to the interview setting and procedure, which adds a further increase in recall from the original version.
The cognitive interview is not always used effectively by police officers. Explain.
The cognitive interview is a questioning technique used by the police to enhance the retrieval of information about a crime scene from the eyewitness’s and victim’s memory.
What are the limitations of cognitive interview?
It is time-consuming to conduct and takes much longer than a standard police interview.
Another limitation, is that some elements of the cognitive interview may be more valuable than others. For example, research has shown that using a combination of ‘’ report everything’’ and ‘’ context reinstatement’’ produced better recall than any of the conditions individually.
