cognitive interview ao1

• Factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony


  • Anxiety/upset
  • Post-event discussion
  • Leading questions
• Anxiety/upset


  Melissa's memory may be worse because of distraction/arousal OR better because she was more alert
• Post-event discussion

  Melissa's memory may be less accurate because she confuses her original memory with what other people say to her
• Leading questions


  Melissa may incorrectly recall what the man was wearing because of Luke's question
• Other factors affecting EWT are not creditworthy because they do not appear in the stem.
• Pickel (1998) criticises the weapon focus effect
• A strength of Christianson and Hubinette's research is that it was a real life study completed within the context of a real life crime
• Bothwell's (1987) participants were tested for personality characteristics and placed in the neurotic category or the stable category


  The stable (less emotionally sensitive) participants showed rising levels of accuracy as stress levels increased, however the neurotics (tend to become more anxious more quickly) accuracy decreased as the stress increased. This shows that individual differences play an important role in the accuracy of EWT.
• The reduced accuracy of identifying the criminal could be through surprise rather than anxiety
• Cognitive interview


  A police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crime, which encourages them to recreate the original context in order to increase the accessibility of stored information
• Cognitive interview


  • Reinstatement of context
  • Report everything
  • Change order
  • Change perspective
• Mental reinstatement


  The interviewer encourages the witness to mental recreate the physical and psychological environment or the original incident
• Report everything


  The interviewer encourages the witness to report everything they can remember. Every single detail without editing and interruption.
• Change order


  The interviewer may encourage the witness to recall events in different orders (for example from the end to the start)
• Change perspective


  The interviewer may ask the witness to change the perspectives to someone else in order to aid their recall
• Live ammo should never be allowed in historical reenactments
• Actors involved with historic Wild West reenactments go through six weeks of training each year
• If an actor takes a gun they'll use in a performance home, two safety inspectors analyze the gun before it's used in a reenactment
• Accidents happen, and we all understand that. We want to eliminate as many things as we can that would cause someone to get injured
• Techniques used in the cognitive interview

  1. Mental reinstatement

  2. Report everything

  3. Change order

  4. Change perspective
• One technique used in cognitive interviews is mental reinstatement. This is where the interviewee is asked to mentally recreate the physical and psychological environment of the original incident. An example of a question which fits this technique is "I would like you to try and think back to the say it happened. Think about that day. What had you been doing? What was the weather like?" The purpose of asking witnesses to recall this way is because it uses emotional and contextual cues to make memories more accessible.