M - Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: The cognitive interview Flashcards
What were the 2 main influences behind the development of the cognitive interview?
- The need to improve the effectiveness of police interviewers when questioning witnesses.
- To apply the results of psychological research to this area, particularly the work of Elizabeth Loftus, whose research had already dispelled the myth that eyewitness memory operates like a video camera.
Cognitive interview
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.
Who developed the cognitive interview?
Geiselman et al. (1984).
What 4 distinct components make up the cognitive interview?
- Mental reinstatement of original context.
- Report everything.
- Change order.
- Change perspective.
Explain ‘mental reinstatement of original context’ as a component of the cognitive interview
The interviewer encourages the interviewee to mentally recreate both the physical and psychological environment of the original incident.
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.
Explain ‘report everything’ as a component of the cognitive interview
The interviewer encourages the reporting of every single detail of the event without editing anything out, even though it may seem irrelevant. Witnesses should not leave anything out even if they believe it to be insignificant or irrelevant.
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.
Explain ‘change order’ as a component of the cognitive interview
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 events starting from the end of the event backwards this prevents your pre-existing schema influencing what you recall.
Explain ‘change perspective’ as a component of the cognitive interview
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 done to disrupt the effect that schemas have on recall.
(This approach was suggested by the research by Anderson and Pichert, 1978.)
Who was the ‘change perspective’ approach to the cognitive interview suggested by?
Anderson and Pichert. (1978)
What did Fisher and Geiselman (1992) say was wrong with the standard police interview technique?
Revolves around the interviewer rather than the interviewee (the interviewer does most of the talking and often asks specific questions that require forced choice answers such as ‘was the criminal black or white?’).
Questions are often predetermined following a written checklist and witnesses are discouraged from adding extra information.
The interviewer may unconsciously ask leading questions to confirm his/her beliefs about the crime.
Discussions during such interviews may contaminate a witness’ memory so that what they recall later is inaccurate.
Such practices tend to increase the amount of inaccurate information collected in the interview.
Also, it such practices encourage witnesses to withhold information, give abbreviated answers and provide answers they are unsure of.
The standard techniques disrupt the natural process of searching through memory, thereby making memory retrieval inefficient.
How did Anderson and Pichert (1978) suggest the approach of changing perspectives in the CI?
The conducted a study by asking ppts to read a story about two boys playing hooky from school.
Ppts were randomly allocated to one of two recall conditions; some ppts were asked to imagine they were a prospective house buyer recalling the details while the other ppts were asked to recall the details from the perspective of a burglar.
The kind of details recalled varied depending on which perspective they took. Furthermore, when ppts were asked to recall the story again, this time from the other perspective, they recalled new information.
