Improving the accuracy of eye-witness testimonies - Memory Psychology

The cognitive interview is...a method of interviewing police use on eyewitnesses, with the aim of helping them retrieve memories that are accurate. It has four main techniques:

1. Report everything
2. Reinstate the order
3. Reverse the order
4. Change the perspective

Fisher and Geiselman (1992) found that people remember things better if they are provided with retrieval cues.

-       Report everything: witnesses are asked to recall every detail of the event even if it seems irrelevant or they don’t feel confident about it. Trivial details could be important and they may also trigger other important memories.

-       Reinstate the context: the witness returns to the original scene of the crime ‘in their mind’ and imagines the environment (eg. Weather) and how they were feeling. This is related to context dependent forgetting

-       Reverse the order: events should be recalled in a different chronological order than what they happened. For example, telling the details from end to start. This helps to prevent people from reporting expectations of what they think must have happened rather than what actually happened. This is also useful to prevent dishonesty as it’s hard to lie in reverse order.

-       Change the perspective: (effective on children) witnesses should recall the incident from another person’s perspective. This is done to disrupt the effect of expectations or schemas on recall. (eg. The schema for a setting may be recalled rather than what actually happened).

Enhanced cognitive interview

Fisher et al. (1987) devised some additional elements to the cognitive interview which focused on social dynamics of interaction. For example:

-       The interviewer must know when to establish eye contact and when to remove it

-       Ask the witness to speak slowly

-       Ask open questions

Evaluation

P: supporting research
E: Geiselman et al (1985) found that the cognitive interview produced more accurate and detailed memories than a standard police interview
E: this suggests that it is relatively effective and has useful real-life applications.

P: time consuming
E: takes more time than a standard police interview and so police may be more reluctant to use it. It also requires special training which is time consuming.
E: this means that it’s unlikely that police will opt to use a ‘proper’ cognitive interview and so the accuracy of EWT’s may be reduced.

P: also increases the amount of inaccurate information
E: Kohnken et al (1999) found an 81% increase in correct information but also a 61% increase in incorrect information when a cognitive interview was used, compared to a standard police interview
E: makes it a less useful technique and the information provided must always be questioned on its validity.

P: Holliday (2003) showed children aged 5-9 a video of a child's birthday party, and interviewed them the next day using both the cognitive and standard interview methods

E: They found that the cognitive interview yielded more correct details about the video than the standard interview

E: This therefore shows that it can be very useful when interviewing children