The Cognitive interview Flashcards
What is a cognitive interview?
A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories. It uses four main techniques, all based on evidence-based psychological knowledge of human memory - report everything, reinstate the context, reverse the order and change perspective
What is a report everything question?
The witness is encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even if they seem irrelevant or trivial.
What is a reinstate the context question?
The witness should return to the original crime scene in their mind and imagine the environment (e.g. weather, what they could see) and their emotions. Then they are asked to describe what they saw.
What is a reverse the order question?
Events should be recalled in a different chronological order to the original sequence e.g. from the final point back to the beginning or from the middle to the beginning.
What is a change the perspective question?
Witnesses should recall the incident from the perspective of some else e.g. another witness or the perpetrator.
Why is report everything important?
Witnesses might not realise that some details are important, and these may trigger (act as cues for) other important memories, leading to more accurate testimonies.
Why is reinstate the context important?
Recalling how you felt and the environment could enhance recall by preventing context-dependent and state-dependent forgetting i.e. By making the context/state at encoding (when the crime occurred) and retrieval (when describing the crime to the police) match, according to the encoding-specificity principle, the cues should be helpful at retrieval and lead to more accurate testimonies.
Why is reverse the order important?
This is to prevent people from reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events. It also prevents dishonesty as it’s harder to lie when you have to explain something backwards.
Why is change the perspective important?
This disrupts the effect of expectations and schema on recall. The schema you have for a particular setting (e.g. going into a shop) generate expectations of what would have happened and it is the schema that is recalled rather than what actually happened.
What is schema?
a framework of knowledge (a set of things you know about something).
Report everything example question
‘Please describe the mugging in as much detail as you can, even if you think the information is irrelevant.’
(must add) The witness might then mention something irrelevant such as: which shop they came out of. This may act as a cue to trigger more important memories, such as what the mugger looked like and what direction they ran off in.
Reinstate the context example q
‘Please imagine in your mind where you were when you saw the mugging, what shop did you come out of? What as the weather like? How did you feel?
(must add) Then please describe in detail what you saw in the mugging.’
Supporting evidence - Milne and Bull (2002) and what it shows
Milne and Bull (2002) found that using a combination of report everything and reinstate the context produced better recall than any of the other conditions. This confirmed police officers’ suspicions that some aspects of the CI are more useful than others.
This supports that at least these two elements should be used to improve police interviewing of eyewitnesses even if the full CI isn’t used. (encoding specificity principle)
This in turn increases the credibility of the CI amongst those who use it – police officers.
Weakness of cognitive interview - time consuming and what it shows
Police may be reluctant to use the CI because it takes much more time than the standard police interview. And more training needed)
This means that it is unlikely that the ‘proper’ version of the CI is actually used, which may explain why more police have not been that impressed by it. Therefore, the CI may be effective when used correctly, but it is often not.
Support for police reluctance to use CI - Kohnken et al. and what it shows
They combined data from 55 studies in a meta-analysis to compare the CI and enhanced CI with a normal interview.
The enhanced CI consistently provided more correct information than the standard interview used by police (81% increase in correct information). The CI gave an average 41% increase in accurate information compared to the standard interview. Kohnken et al. also found a 61% increase in the amount of incorrect information when the enhanced CI was used (more than the CI) compared to the standard interview
This is a strength because such studies indicate that there are real practical benefits to the police using the enhanced version of the CI. This research suggests that it gives the police a greater chance of catching and charging criminal, which is beneficial to society as a whole. However, the police should consider that the enhanced CI also increases the amount of incorrect information and so testimonies using is should still be treated with some caution.
Weakness of the studies - variations of the CI
Studies of the effectiveness of the CI use slightly different variations of the CI and some use the enhanced CI. The same is true in real life – the police evolve their own methods.
This means that it is difficult to truly evaluate the effectiveness of the CI because a true comparison cannot be made. Therefore from the research, we can’t strongly support the use of the CI by the police.
