The Cognitive Interview - A01 Flashcards
(11 cards)
Who made the cognitive interview?
Ronald Fisher and Edward Geiselman.
What did Fisher and Geiseman argue about police interviews?
EWT could be improved if the police used better when interviewing witnesses.
What techniques did F&G recommend?
That they should be based on psychological insights and memory works, using the foundation of cognitive psychology.
What are the 4 steps of the cognitive interview?
-Report everything
-Reinstate the context
-Reverse the order
-Change perspective
What does it mean to ‘report everything’?
-Witnesses should feel encouraged to include every detail of the event, even if it may seem irrelevant.
-Trivial (not important) details may be important and trigger other memories.
What does reinstate the context mean?
-Witnesses should turn back the the ‘original crime’ in their mind and imagine the environment and emotions.
-Related to context- dependent forgetting.
What does reverse the order mean?
-Events should be recalled in a different chronological order to the original sequence.
-Preventing people recalling their ‘expectations’ of how the event must have went, to get the truth out of witnesses.
What does change perspective mean?
-Witnesses should recall the incident from other’s perspectives.
-Disrupting the effect of expectations and schema on recall.
-Schema for a witness for a particular setting generates expectations of what would have happened, rather than what actually happened.
What is the enhanced cognitive interview? (ECI)
Fisher et al- focuses on the social dynamics of the interaction.
-Focuses on reducing eyewitness anxiety and minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions.
What is the standard police interview?
-Fisher and Gelselman- identified what is wrong with the techniques usually used by policemen when interviewing witnesses.
-Interview revolves around the interviewer rather than the witness.
What does the standard police interview tend to do?
-Contaminate the witnesses memory with the leading questions, making memory retrieval inefficient.
-Increase the amount of inaccurate information collected in the interview.
-Predetermined practices encourage witnesses to withhold information and give abbreviated answers.
