Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony Flashcards
The cognitive interview definition
A police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crime, which encourages them to recreate the original context of the crime in order to increase the accessibility of stored information.
Because our memory is made up of a network of associations rather than of discrete events, memories are accessed using multiple retrieval strategies.
4 parts of cog interview
- Mental reinstatement of original context
- Report everything
- Change order
- Change perspective
Mental reinstatement of original context
Interviewer encourages the interviewee to mentally recreate both the physical and psychological environment of the original incident
The interviewer may say: would like you to try to think back to the day the event happened. Think about that day… what had you been doing… what was the weather like … try and get a picture of it in your mind. How did you feel at the time?
The aim is to make memories accessible. People often cannot access memories that are there. They need appropriate contextual and emotional cues to retrieve memories.
Report everything
The interviewer encourages the reporting of every single detail of the event without editing anything out, even though it may seem irrelevant
Interviewer may say: please do not leave anything out. I am interested in absolutely everything that you remember, anything that pops into your head
Memories are interconnected with one another so that recollection of one item may then cue a whole lot of other memories. In addition the recollection of small details may eventually be pieced together from many different witnesses to form a clearer picture of the event.
Change order
The interviewer may try alternative ways through the timeline of the incident, for example by reversing the order in which events occurred.
The rationale behind this is that our recollections are influenced by schemas
If you have to recall the events starting from the end of the event backwards this prevents your pre-existing schema influencing what you recall.
Change perspective
The interviewee is asked to recall the incident from multiple perspectives, for example by imagining how it would have appeared to other witnesses present at the time.
This is again done to disrupt the effect that schemas have on recall.
AO3:
lim: probs w ci in practice
lim: quality may suffer
str: research support
str/lim: indiv diffs
lim: probs w ci in practice
Another criticism of the Cl is the amount of time and training needed to implement it.
From their interviews with police, Kebbell and Wagstaff report a problem with the Cl in practice. Police officers suggest that this technique requires more time than is often available and that instead they prefer to use deliberate strategies aimed to limit an eyewitness report to the minimum amount of information that the officers feel is necessary.
In addition, the Cl requires special training and many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours
These limitations have meant that the use of the Cl in police interviews has not been widespread.
lim: quality may suffer
effectiveness has largely been in terms of quantity of information, rather than quality.
The procedure is designed to enhance the quantity (the amount) of correct recall without compromising the quality (the amount of correct recall as a percentage of total recall) of that information.
Köhnken et al: found an 81% increase of correct information but also a 61% increase of incorrect information (false positives) when the enhanced Cl was compared to a standard interview.
This means that police need to treat all information collected from Cls with
caution. It does not guarantee accuracy.
str: research support
A strength of the cognitive interview is the amount of supporting research.
A meta-analysis of 53 studies found, on average, an increase of 34% in the amount of correct information generated in the Cl compared with standard interviewing techniques
BUT most of these studies involved volunteer witnesses (usually college students) tested in a lab (such studies may not reflect real-world practices).
Milne and Bull (2002) found that when participants were interviewed using a combination of the report everything’ and ‘mental reinstatement’ components of the Cl, their recall was significantly higher than when using just one individual component or the control condition (being instructed simply to ‘try again).
This suggests that overall the Cl is an effective technique for increasing the
accessibility of stored information.
str/lim: indiv diffs
The Cl may be particularly useful when interviewing older witnesses.
Negative stereotypes about older adults “declining’ memory can make such witnesses overly cautious about reporting information. The Cl may overcome such difficulties, because it stresses the importance of reporting any detail regardless of its perceived insignificance.
Mello and Fisher compared older (mean age 72) and younger (mean age 22) adults’ memory of a filmed simulated crime using either a Cl or a standard police interview (Sl). The Cl produced more information than the Sl but, significantly, the strength of the Cl over the SI was greater for the older than for the young participants.
This suggests that individual differences matter and that the Cl is more effective when interviewing older people in comparison to younger people
