Improving EWT: Cognitive Interview

Standard Interview (SI):

Fisher and Gieselman identified a number of ways that standard police interview methodology could negatively affect eye witnesses’ recall accuracy of crimes.

For example, they found that it required little, to no training. The interviewers would be free to ask what ever they felt was relevant and this means that questions could be random and jump between different information e.g. visuals of a suspect and then jump to comments made by others. In addition, questions would often be closed yes/no questions or require short answers. This leads to interruptions and inappropriate sequences of questions which can be confusing for a witness.

For example:

  1. Where were you last night?
  2. What were you doing?
  3. Who were you with?
  4. What time was it?

Fisher and Gieselman (1992) designed the Cognitive Interview

At the start of a cognitive interview, the interviewer attempts to help the witness feel relaxed, and seeks to tailor their language to suit the individual. The interview focuses on utilizing retrieval cues, a Fisher and Gieselman claimed that this aids recall. The interviewer is encouraged to follow the witnesses train of thought rather than get them to recall incidents in chronological order. They try to ensure that distractions are kept to a minimum, allow pauses, and ask open ended questions.

The technique is based around four main components:

Report everything: It encourages witnesses to report all detail that they can remember regardless of how trivial it may appear. This techniques avoids interruptions and might be useful in triggering additional information.

Context reinstatement: It tries to recreate the scene of the incident in the mind of the witness, this includes the sights, sounds and smells, emotions and feelings of the person at the time.  This is based on the concept of cue dependent memory. The idea that if there the context or state of recall is similar to the actual event, memory recall will improve.

Narrative reordering: It encourages witnesses to recall events in different orders, for example starting half way through a sequence of events and then working backwards. This is done to prevent people from reporting expectations of how the event must have happened (schemas), rather than the actual event. It also helps to prevent lying, because those telling the truth will find narrative reordering easier than those being dishonest.

Recall from a different perspective: It encourages witnesses to view the scene as others present may have seen it, for example as other witnesses, the victim or the perpetrator may have seen the incident. This is encourage recall of what actually happened instead of recalling expectations from schemas i.e. expectations of what happened due to the setting or situation that you are in. 

Research: 

Fisher (1989)

Carried out a field experiment to test the use of Cognitive Interview in a real life setting, to see if it enhanced the memory of both witnesses and victims of real crimes. Interviews with real witnesses by 16 detectives of a robbery division in Florida were carried out. One group of detectives were trained to use CI where as the other group had no training (likely to use Standard Interview). They found that 63% more information were recorded in the trained CI group compared to the untrained group.

Evaluation

Strengths:

  • Usefulness – Kohnken et al. (1999) – Carried out a meta-analysis of 50 studies and found that the Enhanced Cognitive Interview gave consistently more accurate information (81% increase) in comparison to the Standard Interview. However, they also found that witnesses recalled more incorrect information (61%) when interviewed with the Enhanced cognitive interview compared to the standard interview technique, perhaps because more detailed recall increases the chances of making mistakes.
  • Usefulness – We have learned from research the benefits of cognitive interview and it has allowed a greater understanding of its effectiveness. Milne & Bull (2002) Found that when they used a combination of “report everything” and “mental reinstatement”, participants’ recall was significantly higher compared to other combinations. 
  • Individual differences – age:  Wright and Holliday (2007) investigated how age affects recall. They found that when they used the cognitive interview technique, the older participants recalled significantly greater detail without giving any false information. However, Gieselman’s (1999) research suggests that young children seem to find the instructions of the cognitive interview confusing, and as a result produces poorer recall than with standard police interviews. From his research, he recommends that CI is only used on children aged eight and over.

Weaknesses:

  • Generalisability – It is difficult to compare studies carried out in different countries and even between different police forces within a country since there are now so many variations on the CI.  For example in the UK the Merseyside force use pretty much the original Fisher and Geiselman design whereas Thames Valley Police tend to drop the ‘reinstating context.’ This may make it difficult to generalise the findings and be effectively implemented to a variety of police departments.
  • Usefulness – Practical issues – the cognitive interview tends to be too time-consuming in practice. This also leads to inconsistency in how the technique is put into practice. This could have huge consequences in testimonies, as some people with have higher quality interviews than others, and this could lead to someone either being wrongly convicted, or wrongly found not guilty. A further criticism of early studies of the CI was that the amount and quality of training that interviewers were given was not consistent. It is likely that differences in the attitudes, motivation and prior experience of the interviewers play a big role in determining the kind of results obtained with the CI.
  • Subjective – In practically all studies, performance is measured in terms of the percentage of interview statements that are correct or the absolute number of correct and incorrect statements. One potential problem of limiting research to these measures is that it ignores the amount of unreported information, which is as important to determine the effectiveness of any interview procedure. For example if a person is asked to only tell the truth, they may avoid putting some information forward if they aren’t completely sure it is the truth. Therefore, further research is needed in order to improve the way interview techniques are measured in terms of unreported information.
  • Validity – It is difficult to compare Standard Interview with CI due to the fact that they are too different. For example the CI involves thorough training, but SI doesn’t. In addition, it is impossible to control for individual differences as every interviewer has their own approach when using the standard interview, but because CI is so standardised, it doesn’t have this issue. Comparing SI with CI was a good start, however research has now moved on and the SI will obviously be worse in accuracy in comparison, therefore it would probably be better to use CI as the basis of comparison.
  • Individual differences – Gieselman’s (1999) research suggests that young children seem to find the instructions of the cognitive interview confusing, and as a result produces poorer recall than with standard police interviews. From his research, he recommends that CI is only used on children aged eight and over.