The Cognitive Interview Flashcards
What are the 4 main techniques of the cognitive interview?
- Mental reinstatement of original conext
- Report everything
- Change order
- Change perspective
What is mental reinstatement of original context? How does it help?
- Mentally visualising yourself back in the setting of the incident, reconstructing the physical and person contexts
- Helps as memories are all interconnected, so the recall of one may act as a cue to other memories. This concept is based on Tulving’s encoding specificity principle
What is reporting everything? How does it help?
- Reporting all details from start to finish, even if information seems irrelevant or the witness does not seem confident about
- Helps as memories are all interconnected, so the recall of one may act as a cue to other memories. This concept is based on Tulving’s encoding specificity principle
What is changing order? How does it help?
- Interviewer asks witness to recall events in a different chronological order in which they occurred
- Disrupts effect of schema on recall, as schema would cause recall of events that were expected to happen, rather than what actually happened
What is changing perspective? How does it help?
- Witnesses were asked to recall the incident from multiple perspectives, such as from another witness’ point of view
- Disrupts effect of schema on recall, as schema would cause recall of events that were expected to happen, rather than what actually happened
Who improved the cognitive interview? How did he do this?
- Fisher added additional social elements of interaction between witness and interviewer
- Interviewer must know when they should and shouldn’t make eye contact
- Anxiety of witness should be reduced
- Distractions should be minimised
- Witnesses should speak slower
- Open ended questions must be used
What are the evaluations for the strengths of the cognitive interview?
Effectiveness
* Geiselman et al set out to investigate the effectiveness of the cognitive interview
* Participants viewed a film of a violent crime and, after 48 hours, were interviewed with either the cognitive interview, the standard interview or hypnosis
* The average number of recalled facts for the cognitive interview was the highest, then hypnosis, then standard
* This clearly demonstrates that the cognitive interview leads to better memory of events with witnesses recalling more than the standard interview
Further effectiveness
* There is more real life evidence supporting the effectiveness of the CI
* FIsher et al trained detectives to use the cognitive interview. Police interviews with eyewitnesses and victims were videotaped and the total number of statements was scored. A second eyewitness then confirmed
* Compared to standard procedure, the CI produced a 46% increase in recall and 90% accuracy
* The findings suggested the CI is more effective than the standard interview
What are the evaluations for the weaknesses of the cognitive interview?
The CI is time consuming
* A limitation of the CI is the amount and time training needed to implement
* Kebbell and Wagstaff interviewed police and found that officers believe CI is very time consuming and requires more time to carry out than is often available. Instead they would rather use deliberate strategies to get the minimum information necessary
* In addition, the CI requires special training and many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours
* These limitations meant that the use of the CI in police interviews is not widespread
CI creates an increase in inaccuracy
* Inaccurate information increases
* The procedure is designed to enhance the amount of correct recall, and research suggests it does. However, it also increases amount of incorrect recall too
* Kohnken et al found an 81% increase in correct information but also a 61% increase of incorrect information using the CI
* This means the police need to treat all information collected from CIs with caution as it does not guarantee accuracy
Comparisons are difficult
* There are issues when trying to evaluate the effectiveness of the CI when it is used in the real world
* The problems is that it is not really just one procedure, but a collection of techniques that have been evolved and changed by various police department
* Thames valley police use a version that does not include ‘changing perspectives’. Other police forces tend to only use ‘reinstate context’ and ‘report everything’ components
* This means it is hard to establish the overall effectiveness of the CI when all four components are used, as many police forces don’t use them all
