Welcome

Welcome to The Cognitive Interview blog. This blog is intended to provide information designed to help anyone who has to work with eyewitnesses, such as factors that affect the accuracy of eyewitness memory. This blog will also make some recommendations as to what professionals can do and should avoid doing in order to make the testimony of witnesses as accurate as possible.

Disclaimer: This blog has been created as part of my As-Level Psychology work. This blog is not intended for practice.

The Cognitive Interview Technique

Eyewitness testimonies play an important role in the legal system, should it go wrong, then serious repercussions could occur.

The Cognitive Interview technique is a questioning technique that police use enhance the retrieval of information from witnesses who have witnessed a crime. It encourages the witness to recreate the original context in order to increase the accessibility of stored information.

By improving the effectiveness of questioning witnesses in police interviews we can improve the accuracy of eyewitness testimonies.

Cognitive Interview Schedule

The cognitive interview schedule was developed by Fisher and Geiselman in 1992. The schedule is listed below.

1) Report everything (report every single detail of the event)

2) Mental Reinstatement of the original context (mentally recreate the original event)

3) Changing the oder (try alternative ways through timeline of the incident)

4) Changing the perspective (imagining how it would appear to the other witnesses)

Geiselman and colleagues

Geiselman and colleagues tested the effectiveness of the Cognitive Interview by comparing it with standard police interview techniques.

They conducted a study in which they showed police training videos of violent crimes to a group of 89 students, and roughly 48 hours later, the students were interviewed individually by interviewers who had either been trained in standard police interviewing, or trained in the new cognitive interview schedule.

All interviews were recorded on tape and then were analysed for the accuracy of recall. The results demonstrated that the students recalled considerably more information when the cognitive interview schedule was used in comparison to standard police interviewing.

However, it is important to note that the participants in this study were undergraduates who watched video tapes in an artificial setting. This means that this study lacks ecological validity.

Wright and Holliday (2007) - Age and Recall

Researchers Wright and Holliday conducted a study in 2007 that investigated how age affects recall of information. They found that the older the participant, the less complete and accuracy of recall was.

However, the study showed that when the cognitive interview technique was used, the older participants remembered a lot more information with more detail and that they gave no incorrect information.

In conclusion, this study proves that the cognitive interview technique does increase the accuracy of recall as it provides significantly more information and reduces the amount of false information given. This means that the cognitive interview technique can be used to gain more accurate information and help to reduce miscarriages of justice.