improving accuracy of ewt Flashcards
who designed cognitive interview
fisher and geiselman
- reporting
report everything - encourages witnesses to report all detail that they can remember regardless of how trivial it may appear
- context
context reinstatement - tries to recreate scene of the incident in the mind of the witness, including sights, sounds and smells but also crucially tries to model the emotions and feelings of person at time. based on concept of cue dependent memory
- reverse
recall in reverse order - encourages witnesses to recall events in different orders, eg starting half way through a sequence of events then working backwards
- perspective
recall from a different perspective - encourages witnesses to view scene as others present may have seen it
purpose of steps
point 1 and 2 designed to reinstate context so witness mentally revisits scene and mentally reconstructs incident in their mind
3 and 4 based on idea once a memory has been stored there is more than one way retrieving it
what is enhanced cognitive interview and strength
slightly modified version where interviewers use open questions instead of closed (leading qs) and encouraged to follow witnesses train of thought rather than get them to recall incidents in chrono order.
s- miami police reported an increase of 46% in amount of detail recalled by witnesses, where corroborative evidence was available 90% of this additional testimony was shown to be accurate
(escape) - effectiveness geiselman
geiselman et al got pts to watch a video of a violent crime
few days later they were interviewed in one of 3 ways - standard police interview, cognitive interview or under hypnosis. cog interview found to trigger most accurate recall
t: useful for police
effectiveness kohnken
kohnken carried out a meta analysis of 53 other studies and found the ci could elicit an average of 34% more detail than standard interview and crucially without loss of accuracy you get with hypnosis
practicality - time
p: ci methid is time consuming so can result in differences of its use
e: can be difficult to compare studies carried out in different countries and even different police forces within a country since there are now so many variations on the ci.
e.g in the uk the merseyside force use original fisher and geiselman design whereas thames valley police tend to drop reinstating context
suitability
P: young children tend to find instructions confusing
e: as a result produce less reliable recall than with standard police interviews. geiselman reccomends ci only used on children only 8 and over.
