Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony

• What is the cognitive interview - Fisher and Geiselman (1992) 


  -This is a police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crime

  -It aims to increase accessibility of stored information based on psychological research
• Fisher and Geiselman developed a cognitive interview based on ?

  -The cognitive interview was based on demonstrated psychological principles concerning effective recall

  –The aim is to encourage the eye witness to recall more information.

  -The cognitive interview uses four main techniques to achieve this improved accuracy and detail
• What are the 4 main techniques of the cognitive interview?

  -Report everything

  -Context reinstatement

  -Reverse the order

  -Change perspective
• Report everything?

  Report Everything’ (RE) – The interviewer encourages the eyewitness to report every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant.

  -This is because what might seem irrelevant to the eyewitness may actually be of importance to the investigation and also, irrelevant details may serve as retrieval cues to help prompt more relevant details to be recalled.
• Context reinstatement

  Asking the eyewitness to imagine themselves back at the scene of the crime again (relates to context dependent forgetting) This provides retrieval cues to help them access their memory of the event.
• Reverse the order

  Events should be recalled in different chronological order e.g. start in the middle or from the end -Increases accuracy and detail of recall
• Change perspective

  The witness is asked to recall the incident from multiple perspectives and not just from their own -This disrupts schema effects
• Evaluation - Economy

  -A strength of the CI is that it may have a positive effect on the economy:

  -This means that, by improving the accuracy of EWT, the CI may be helping to improve efficiency in the legal system. For example, it may help police identify criminals sooner by maximising the information eyewitnesses can give. This is positive as it helps reduce waste and improve efficiency in the justice system.
• Evaluation - Ethical issues?

  However, conducting cognitive interviews may raise ethical issues:

  This means that asking participants to mentally ‘relive’ often very traumatic experiences might well lead to a lack of protection from harm. For example, someone who witnessed a particularly violent murder or sexual assault might find going through the event in such vivid detail too traumatic. This is a problem as it might go against the ethical code of conduct
• Evaluation- Time?

  Additionally, the police have criticised the amount of time cognitive interviews take:

  This means that in practice, it seemed that the officers felt unable to conduct a full cognitive interview due to the lack of time available and the need for the key details rather than great detail. For example, it has been shown that officers often favoured using the RE and CR instructions but would not spend time using the CP and RO instructions. This is a problem as it suggests that not all of the techniques of the cognitive interview are useful