the cognitive interview (eyewitness testimony)

• Based on psychological understanding of memory

  • Fisher and Geiselman = claimed that EWT could be improved if the police use techniques based on psychological insights into how memory works
  • They called it the cognitive interview to indicate its foundation in cognitive psychology
  • Rapport (understanding) is established with interviewee using 4 main techniques
  • Report everything
  • Reinstate the context
  • Reverse the order
  • Change perspective
• report everything

  • witnesses are encouraged to include every detail of an 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
• reinstate the context

  • The witness returns to the original crime scene ‘in their mind’ and imagines the environment (eg the weather, what they could see) and their emotions (eg what they felt)
  • This is based on the concept of context-dependent forgetting - cues from the context may trigger recall
• reverse the order

  • Events are recalled in a different order (eg from the end back to the beginning, or from the middle to the beginning)
  • This prevents people basing their descriptions on their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events
  • It also prevents dishonesty (harder to produce an untruthful account if it has to be reversed)
• change perspective

  • Witnesses recall the incident from other people‘s perspective
  • How would it have appeared to another witness or to the 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
• enhanced cognitive interview

  • Fisher et al = developed additional elements to the cognitive interview
  • Includes:
  • a forces on the social dynamics of the interactions (eg knowing when to establish and relinquish eye contact)
  • reducing the eyewitness‘s anxiety
  • Minimising distractions
  • getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions
• Strength = research support for the effectiveness of the CI

  • Kohnken et el = meta-analysis combined data from 55 studies comparing CI and ECI with the standard police interview
  • The CI produced an average of 41% more correct information than the standard interview (only 4 studies show no difference)
  • Shows that the CI is effective in helping witnesses recall information that is available but not accessible
• counterpoint to research support for effectiveness

  • Kohnken et al = also found increases in the amount of inaccurate information, especially in the EIC (quantity over quality)
  • => police officers need to be vary careful about how they treat eyewitness evidence from CIs/ECIs
• limitation = some elements of the CI are more useful than others

  • Milne and Bull = found that each individual technique of the CI alone produce more information that 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 combined
  • This casts doubt on the credibility of the overall CI becuase some of the techniques are less effective than the others
• limitation = CI is time-consuming

  • Police are reluctant to use the CI becuase it takes more time than the standard police interview (eg to establish rapport and allow the witness to relax)
  • The CI also requires special training but many forces do not have the resources to provide more than a few hours of training
  • suggests that the complete CI is not realistic for police officers to use and it might be better to focus on just a few key elements
• extra evaluation = variations of the CI

  • Police forces take a ‘pick and mix’ approach in the practice which makes it hard to compare effectiveness in studies
  • BUT = this approach makes the CI more flexible because police forces (or individual) evolve their own approaches depending on what they think works best
  • This variation is a benefit of the CI becuase it can be adapted to different situations, increasing its credibility for officers, though not for empirical research