– Although eyewitness testimony may lack accuracy EWT is still vital to the police and courts
– So, psychologists have been looking into how to improve EWT, one of the ways being the cognitive interview
THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW
– Fisher and Geiselman (1992) argued that eyewitness testimony could be improved if the police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses.
– They recommended that such techniques should be based on psychological insights into how memory works, and called these techniques collectively the cognitive interview.
There are four main techniques:
– Report Everything
– Reinstate the Context
– Reverse the Order
– Change Perspective
REPORT EVERYTHING
– 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 the recollection of one item may be the cue into a whole lot of other memories.
– In addition the recollection of small details may eventually need pieced together and many different witnesses to form a clearer picture of the event.
REINSTATE THE CONTEXT
– The interviewer encourages the interviewee to mentally recreate both the physical and psychological environment of the original incident.
– They are told to think about the weather, the colours, their feelings etc.
– The aim is to make memories accessible as possible by giving these cues.
– People often cannot access memories that are there, they need appropriate contextual and emotional cues to retrieve memories.
REVERSE THE ORDER
– The interviewer may try alternative ways through the timeline of the incidents, for example by reversing the order in which events occur.
– This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events.
– The rationale behind this is that all our recollections are influenced by schemas.
– If you have to recall the events starting from the end of the event backwards this prevents your pre-existing schema influencing what you recall
– It also prevents dishonesty
CHANGE THE PERSPECTIVE
– The interviewee is asked recall the incident from multiple perspectives, for example by imagining how it would have appeared to other people to witness the event at the time.
– Eg. Another witness or the perpetrator
– This is done to disrupt the effect that expectations and schemas have on recall.
THE ENHANCED COGNITIVE INTERVIEW
– In 1987 Fisher developed some additional elements of the CI to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction.
– For example, the interviewer should know when to establish eye contact.
– The enhanced cognitive interview also includes ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open ended questions
EVALUATION OF THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW
STRENGTHS
Research support
– A meta-analysis by Kohnken in 1999 combined data from 50 studies.
– The enhanced CI consistently provided more correct information than the standard interview used in police.
– This is a strength because studies such as this one indicate that there are real practical benefits to the police of using the enhanced version of the CI.
– The research shows that it gives the police a greater chance of catching and charging criminals, which is beneficial to society as a whole.
Each Technique is Valuable
– Milne and Bull (2002) found that each individual technique is equally as valuable
– Each technique produced more info than a Standard Interview conducted by police.
– Participants were interviewed using a combination of report everything and mental reinstatement components of the CI
– Recall was significantly higher than when using just individual component or the control condition.
– This suggests that overall the Cognitive Interview is an effective technique for increasing the accessibility of stored information.
LIMITATIONS
Time consuming
– Police may be reluctant to use the CI as it is time-consuming
– It takes a lot longer than the standard police interview
– More time is needed to establish a rapport with the witness and to get them to relax
– The CI lso requires special training which the police aren’t able to provide much of
– But many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours’ worth.
– This means it is unlikely that the proper version of the CI is actually used
– Which may explain why police have not been that impressed by it
Quality May Suffer
– A criticism of the CI is that its effectiveness has largely been in terms of quantity of information, rather than quality.
– The procedure is designed to enhance the quantity of the information without compromising the quality of that information.
– Kohnken et al found an 81% increase of correct information but also a 61% increase of incorrect information when the enhanced CI was compared to a standard interview.
– This means that police need to treat all of the information collected from CI’s with caution they do not guarantee accuracy.