Memory - cognitive interview (eyewitness testimony) Flashcards
What is the cognitive interview?
A method of interviewing eyewitness to help them retrieve more accurate memories
Who called it the cognitive interview?
Fisher and Geiselman
What did Fisher and Geiselmansay about EWT?
Claimed that EWT could be improved if the police use techniques based on psychological insights into how memory works
What are the 4 stages of the cognitive interview?
- plus additional element?
Report everything
Reinstate the context
Reverse the order
Change perspective
Plus enhanced cognitive interview
What is report everything?
1st stage - witnesses are encouraged to include every detail of event, even if it seems irrelevant or the witness is not confident about it .
Seemingly trivial details could be important and may trigger other memories
What is reinstate the context?
2nd stage - witness returns to the orgininal crime science ‘in the mind’ and imagines the environment and their emotions
This is based on the concept of context dependant forgetting. Cues from the context may trigger recall
What is reverse the order?
3rd stage - events are recalled in a different order
This prevents people basing their description on their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events
Also prevents dishonsety
What is change perspective?
4th stage - witnesses recall the incident from other people’s perspective. How would it have appeared to another witness or perpetrator?
This prevents the influence of expectations and schema on recall. Schema are packages of information developed through experience. They generate a framework for interpreting incoming information
What is the ehanced cognitive interview?
Fisher developed additional elements of the CI
This includes a focus on the social dynamics of the interaction
The enhanced CI also includes ideas such as reducing the eyewitness’s anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open ended questions
What are the two limitation of the CI?
Some elements of the CI are more useful than others
It is time consuming
One limitation of the CI is that some elements are more useful than others…
Milline and Bull found that each individual technique of the CI alone produced more information than the standard police interview
But they also found that combining report everything and reinstate the context produced better recall than any other technique individually or comibined
This casts doubt on the credibility of the overall CI because some of the techniques are less effective than the others
Another limitation is that it is time consuming…
Police are reluctant to use the CI because it takes more time than the standard police interview
The CI also requires special training but mny forces do not have the resources to provide more than a few hours training
This suggests the complete CI is not realistic for police officers to use and it might be better to focus on just a few key elements
What is a strength of the CI?
Research support for the effectiveness of the CI
One strength of the CI is the research support for the effectiveness
-new name
A meta analysis by Kohnken combined data from combined data from 55 studies comparing CI with the standard police interview
The CI produced an average of 41% more correct information than the standard interview. Only four studies showed no difference
This shows that the CI is effective in helping witnesses recall information that is avaliable but not accessible
Counterpoint - Kohnken also found increases in ……
the amount of inaccurate information, especially in the enhanced cognitive interview
Therefore police officers need to be very careful about how they treat eyewitness evidence from CIs/ECIs
