Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Cognitive interview

Question 1

What did Fisher and Gieselman argue?

Answer 1

EWT could be better if police improved interviewing techniques - based on psychological insights into how memory works

Question 2

What is the first technique in the cognitive interview?

Answer 2

Report everything

Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant or the witnesses don’t feel confident about it.

Small details may be important, and could trigger other important memories.

Question 3

What is the second technique in the cognitive interview?

Answer 3

Reinstate the context

The witness should return to the original crime scene ‘in their mind’, and imagine the environment and their emotions. (This is related to context-dependent forgetting)

Question 4

What is the third technique in the cognitive interview?

Answer 4

Reverse the order

Events should be recalled in a different order to the original sequence i.e end to beginning or middle to beginning

This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event mist have happened rather than reporting the actual events. It also proves and prevents dishonesty (hard to lie if you have to reverse the events).

Question 5

What is the fourth technique in the cognitive interview?

Answer 5

Change perspective

Witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s perspective. This is done to disrupt the effect of the schema and the effort of expectations on recall. The schema generates expectations of what would have happened and it is the schema that is recalled rather than what actually happened.

Question 6

What is the enhanced cognitive interview?

Answer 6

Fischer added some additional elements to the CI to focus on the interaction. For example, the interviewer needs to know when to make eye contact and when to relinquish it. The enhance CI also includes things such as getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open - ended questions, minimising distractions and reducing eyewitness anxiety.

Question 7

Evaluation for Cognitive interview

Answer 7

The CI is time consuming:
- takes more time and training than the standard police interview
- more time is needed to help the witness relax and it can require special training and many forces do not have the resources to provide more than a few hours
This suggests that the complete CI as it exists is not a realistic method for officers to use and it might be better to just focus on a few key elements

Some elements may be more useful:
- Bull and Milne
- found that each of the four techniques alone produced more information than the standard police interview
- they also found that a combination of report everything and reinstate the context produced better recall than any of the other elements or combination of them
This confirmed police pffocprs suspicions that some aspects are more useful than others which casts some doubt on the credibility of the overall cognitive interview

Support for the effectiveness:
- support study using 55 combined studies found that the CI averaged 41% increase in accurate information compared to standard interview
This shows that the CI is an effective technique to help witnesses recall informed that is stored in memory but not immediately accessible
But a lot more inaccurate information was given - perhaps the approach sacrifices quality of EWT for quantity.

Variations of the CI:
police forces have started using a ‘pick and mix’ approach to find which approach is most efficient for each individual (more flexible)