Cognitive Interviews Flashcards
What is the cognitive interview?
Based on scientific principles of cognitive and social psychology and are intended to facilitate witness memory and communication between the witness and interviewer.
What are the 4 main features of the cognitive interview?
- Context reinstatement
- Report everything
- Change the perspective
- Change the order
Context Reinstatement
Asks interviewees to reconstruct in their minds the context, both physical and personal features of the witnessed events. It is necessary to leave a pause between each of the questions to allow them enough time to picture the event and reinstate the context. Questions should be asked in a slow, deliberate manner and not leading.
Examples of context reinstatement
“Create a picture in your mind, think of where you were, think about the objects, think about the colours. Think about the people who were present, the sounds you could hear and how you were feeling.” This should be answered descriptively and in detail, follow up questions may be asked at a slow pace.
Report everything
This should be an instruction that is consistently repeated throughout the interview to allow for as much information as possible to be reported to the interviewer. The interviewer should explain that this is a difficult task that requires a lot of concentration and information that they may or may not know the answer and that the answer of “I don’t know” is acceptable.
Examples of report everything
” I am going to ask you some questions based on what you have already told me. It is fine to say “I don’t know” and please tell me everything you possibly can in response to these questions “
Change the perspective
This is used to help the reporting of specific details concerning people and objects. For example, people are often unable to remember names. Names can be identified through questions that can lead to further evidence. This can also be used for number plates etc. Changing the perspective allows for extensive recall.
Example of changing the perspective
“Go through the event again and focus on a particular person, like they are in a spotlight. Don’t guess the memory, just imagine what they see and feel.”
Change the order
This is used to promote extensive recall called, “reverse order recall”
This means that script inconsistent information may not occur as the even is not recalled in real time so doesn’t allow for gapes to be filled in with schemas. It also helps to find additional information which is incidental to the script.
Examples of changing the order
“Tell me what happened but backwards. What was the very last thing you saw, or can remember? What happened just before that?” Repetition of “what happened just before that?” until you get to the beginning of the story
Gieselman et al found that accurate recall was significantly higher for cogntive interview than the standard interview.
For example, he found that 41.2% accuracy for the cognitive interview compared with 29.4% accuracy for the standard interview. This shows that cognitive interviews are more effective for memory with witnesses able to recall more relevant information.
Fisher et al found that research had shown no difference in the cognitive interview and the standard interview.
He found that 85% of all statements were correct in all conditions in lab experiments. However, found that there is strong support for cognitive interviews in the field as more information was obtained from witnesses to real events. This could mean that research in a lab is discredited to be accurate as the studies with high ecological validity provide more accurate and supporting data.
Milne and Bull found that the report everything and context reinstatement stages appeared to be the key techniques in gaining accurate data.
They also found that each individual technique is equally as valuable and that each stage accumulated more information than that that was gained in a standard interview. On the other hand, Gieselman and Fisher found that the cognitive interview works better within a short time following the crime compared to a longer time. This could limit their usefulness if it takes too long to find or interview the witness.
It is hard to assess for the effectiveness as the cognitive interview is composed of several techniques which makes comparisons difficult.
For example, there is considerable variations across training the police. As some train the CI completely and have it as a mandatory training, some do not provide any at all and some only provide training for some of the components. This means that it is hard to compare how effective the cognitive interview is as it is used in different ways with different components being highlighted.
The cognitive interview can be time consuming as it often requires more time than police actually have.
For example, the British police stated that it was hard to implement as it is hard to carry out the whole thing due to the amount of time it consumes that police simply do not have. This could mean that they only use some components of the cognitive interview so it may not be as effective.
