Improving the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony: Cognitive Interviews (Fisher and Geiselman)

Question 1

Cognitive Interview

Answer 1

Method of interviewing EW to help them retrieve more accurate memories.

Question 2

Why CI?

Answer 2

When police interview people the techniques should be based on psychological insights into how memory works.

Question 3

4 techniques

Answer 3

Report everything, Reinstate context, Reverse order, Change perspective

Question 4

Report everything

Answer 4

Report every little irrelevant detail. Reporting trivial info might trigger other important info.

Question 5

Reinstate context

Answer 5

Go back to the crime scene in their mind and say the weather and environment. Links to context dependent forgetting

Question 6

Reverse order

Answer 6

From final to start. Prevent people reporting expectations of what happened and prevents lies as it’s harder to lie when telling the story backwards.

Question 7

Change perspective

Answer 7

Disrupts effect of expectations

Question 8

Enhanced Cognitive Interview (Fisher)

Answer 8

Developed more elements of CI to focus on social dynamics of interaction. Eg: interviewer needs to know when to establish eye contact. This also includes, reducing anxiety, getting witness to speak slowly and asking open ended qs.

Question 9

Strength (Milne and Bull)

Answer 9

Some may be more valuable than others. Each element is equally valuable. Each technique used singly produced more info than standard police interview. But they said using combo of reinstating context and reporting everything produced better recall. Strength as these 2 elements should be used to improve CI even if whole thing isn’t used.

Question 10

Strength (Kokhen et al)

Answer 10

Support for effectiveness of ECI. Combined data from 50 studies. Consistently provided more right info than standard police interview. Strength as suggests that there are real practice benefits to police of using ECI. Greater chancd of catching criminals.

Question 11

Weakness

Answer 11

CI is time consuming. Police unwilling to use CI as time consuming. Eg: more time needed to establish rapport with witness and allow them to relax. Also requires special training. Unlikely proper version was used hence why police wasn’t impressed by it.

Question 12

Weakness

Answer 12

Techniques of CI aim to increase amount of right info but recall of wrong info may also be increased. Kokhen found 81% increase in right info but also 61% in wrong info.