Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony- cognitive interview

Who came up with the cog interview?

Fisher and Geiselman (1992)

What is the cog interview?

A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories

What 4 techniques are used in the cog interview?

• report everything

• Reinstate the context

• Reverse the chronological order

• Change perspective

Elaborate on ‘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, moreover, they may trigger other important memories

Elaborate on ‘reinstate the context’

• The witness should return to the original crime scene ‘in their mind’ and imagine the environment (ie- what the weather was like, what they could see) and their emotions (what were their feelings)

• Related to context-dependent forgetting

Elaborate on ‘reverse the chronological order’

• events should be recalled in a different chronological order to the original sequence, eg- from the final point back to the beginning, or from the middle to the beginning

• This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events

• Also prevents dishonesty (harder for people to produce an untruthful account if they have to reverse it)

Elaborate on ‘change perspective’

• witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s perspectives, eg- how it would’ve appeared to other witnesses or to the perpetrator

• This is done to disrupt the effect of expectations and schema on recall

• This schema you have for a particular setting (like going into a shop) generate expectations of what would have happened and it’s the schema that’s recalled rather than what actually happened

What is the enhanced CI?

• fisher developed some additional elements of the CI to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction, eg- the interviewer needs to know when to establish eye contact and when to relinquish it

• Also includes ideas like reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly, and asking open-ended questions

evaluation- the CI is time-consuming

• police may be reluctant to use the CI as it takes much more time than the standard police interview, eg- more time is needed to establish rapport with the witnesses and allow them to relax

• the CI also requires special training and many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours

• this means it’s unlikely that the ‘proper’ version of the CI is actually used, which may explain why police haven’t been that impressed by it

evaluation- some elements may be more valuable than others

• some researchers found that each individual element was equally valuable- each technique used singly produced more info than the standard police interview

• but researchers found that using a combo of report everything and context reinstatement produced better recall than any of the other conditions

• this finding is a strength as it suggests that at least these 2 elements should be used to improve police interviewing of eyewitnesses even if the full CI isn’t used- this in turn increases the credibility of the CI amongst those who use it- police officers

evaluation- support for the effectiveness of the ECI

• research suggests that the enhanced CI may offer special benefits, eg- a meta analysis combined data from 50 studies- the ECI consistently provided more correct info than the SI used by police

• strength- studies like these indicate that there are real practical benefits to the police of using the enhanced version of the CI

• the research shows that it gives the police a greater chance of catching and charging criminals, which is beneficial to society as a whole