Cognitive interview

What is cognitive interview?

Fisher and Geiselman (1992) used psychological research to develop the cognitive interview in order to improve the accuracy of EWT. It uses 4 main techniques

What are the steps of cognitive interview?

1. report everything

2. reinstate context

3. reverse order

4. change perspective

What does reporting everything mean?

witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even if irrelevant or unconfident of the detail. Unimportant details may trigger other memories

What does reinstating context mean?

witnesses should return to the original crime scene mentally and imagine the environment and their emotions. This is an attempt to prevent retrieval failure - context dependent forgetting

What does reversing the order mean?

witnesses should recall in a different chronological order (from end to start). This prevents ppl from reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened and prevents dishonesty

What does changing perspective mean?

witnesses should recall the event from other perspectives. This aims to prevent the effect of expectations and schema of recall. People tend to report what they expect to have happened but not the actual event. Reduces the effects of post-event discussion

Who came up with the enhanced cognitive interview?

Fisher et al

What is the enhanced cognitive interview?

fisher developed some additional elements of the cognitive interview to focus on the social dynamic of interactions. E.g, the interviewer needs to know when to use eye contact. The ECI includes reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions

How is the fact that there are consistent findings within cognitive interview a strength of it (+counter/development)

it makes them a reliable approach of getting the best out of EWT

d: additionally, the fact that the meta-analysis consisted of around 50 case studies means that it is likely to have population validity. It also has RLA as police can using CI to generate more accurate details than standard police interviews

Give an example of this strength

for example, Kohnken et al carried out a meta-analysis of around 50 studies investigating ECI, and found an average of 34% increase in the amount of correct information generated compared with standard police interviews

How is the fact that the majority of the research support for cognitive interviews and enhanced cognitive interviews were done with an artificial approach a weakness?

as using lab experiments means that the researcher has less control over confounding and extraneous variables, and that the research lacks ecological validity as a lab is not a natural environment. On top of this volunteer samples bring about volunteer bias that is not representative of the target population

Give an example of this weakness

for instance, most of this research is conducted in a lab and they often use volunteer samples

How is the fact that the cognitive interview increases the recall of correct and incorrect information a weakness?

as the more incorrect information that witnesses provide to the police, the longer the investigation will be conducted as it will take long to get the correct information

Give an example of this weakness

for example, even though the cognitive interview increases the recall of correct information by 81%more than standard interviews, it also increases the recall of incorrect information 61% more than standard interviews

How is that fact that many people argue that the costs of cognitive interview outweighs the benefits a limitation?

as it takes up so much time and resources, and so it can be considered to be less economical than standard police interviews

Give an example of this limitation

for instance, the cognitive interview is considered to be a time-consuming method and it also requires a considerable amount of training for detectives