EWT: Cognitive interview

• Cognitive interview - A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories

  • Uses four main techniques
• Fisher and Geisleman (1992) argued that eyewitness testimony could be improved if the police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses

  • Recommended that such techniques should be based on psychological insights into how memory works, and called these techniques collectively the cognitive interview
• Fisher and Geiselman (1992) identified that the standard interview revolves around the interviewer rather than the witness

  • The standard techniques disrupt the natural process of searching through memory, thereby making memory retrieval inefficient
• Components of the cognitive interview:

  • Report everything
  • Context reinstatement
  • Recall from a changed perspective
  • Recall in reverse order
• Components of the cognitive interview: REPORT EVERYTHING

  • Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant or the witness doesn't feel confident about it
  • Seemingly trivial details may be important and they may trigger other important memories
• Components of the cognitive interview: CONTEXT REINSTATEMENT

  • The witness should return to the original crime scene 'in their mind' and imagine the environment (what the weather was like, what they could see) and their emotions (happy or bored)
  • This is related to context-dependent forgetting
• Components of the cognitive interview: RECALL IN REVERSE ORDER

  • Events should be recalled in a different order from the original sequence, eg final point back to beginning
• Components of the cognitive interview: CHANGE PERSPECTIVE

  • Witnesses should recall the incident from other people's perspectives
  • Example: How it would have appeared to other witnesses or to the perpetrator
• Components of the cognitive interview: RECALL FROM A CHANGED PERSPECTIVE

  Why:

  • This is done to disrupt the effect of expectations and also the effect of schema on recall
  • The schema you have for a particular setting generate expectations of what would have happened, and it is the schema that is recalled rather than what actually happened
• The enhanced cognitive interview (ECI) - Fisher et al (1987)

  Fisher et al developed some additional elements of the CI to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction

  • For example, the interviewer needs to know when to establish eye contact and when to relinquish it
• The enhanced cognitive interview (ECI) - Fisher et al (1987)

  • The enhanced CI also includes ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions