Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: cognitive interview

PEC grid

Fisher et al. (1987)

•Fisher et al (1987) studied real life interviews by detective officers in Florida over 4 month period.

•They found that witnesses were often asked a series of brief, direct and close-ended questions aimed to elicit facts.

•However, the sequencing of these questions often seemed to be out of sync with the witnesses’ own mental representation of the event.

•Witnesses were often interrupted and not allowed to talk freely about their experiences.

cognitive interview

a questioning technique used by the police to enhance retrieval of information from the witnesses memory

Fisher and Geiselman (1992)

argued that eyewitness testimony could be improved if the police used better techniques when interviewing. They recommended that such techniques should be based on psychological insights into how memory works, and called these techniques collectively the cognitive interview (CI) to indicate its foundation in cognitive psychology.

Main techniques used in the cognitive interview

1.Report everything

2.Reinstate the context

3.Reverse the order

4.Change perspective

report everything

Report every detail you can recall even if it seems irrelevant

reinstate the context

Mentally reinstate the

context of the target event.

Recall the scene, the

weather, what you were

thinking and feeling at the

time, the preceding events,

etc.

reverse the order

Report the event in a different chronological order to the original sequence, for example from the final point back to the beginning

change perspective

Try to describe the

episode as it would

have been seen from

different viewpoints, not just your own.

Enhanced cognitive interview

Fisher at al. (1987) developed some additional elements of the cognitive interview 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 also includes ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions.

strengths of the cognitive interview

• P: supporting evidence (Geiselman et al., 1985)

  E: Geiselman tested the effectiveness of the CI by comparing it with standard polic interviewing techniques. They shoed polic training videos of violent crimes to a group of 89 students. About 48 hours later, the students were interviewed individually by Amwerican law enforcement officers. The intrerviewers had either been training in standard police interving techniques or the new cognitive interview schedule. They found that students