Improving EWT- The Cognitive Interview

Due to the importance of EWT within the legal system and the serious repercussions when it goes wrong, psychologists have tried to develop methods for improving the accuracy of EWT.

One suggestion is to improve the ways in which witnesses are questioned by police and to do this they designed the cognitive interview.

The cognitive interview is a procedure designed for the use in police interviews that involve witnesses.

Fisher and Geiselman (1992) recommended that police interviewing techniques should be based on psychological insights into how memory works.

There are four main techniques used:

1) Report everything
2) Reinstate the context
3) Reverse the order
4) Change perspectives

Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even if they believe that it may be irrelevant or they do not feel comfortable about the detail that they are giving.

Mentally reinstate the context of the event

Get the witness to recall the scene, the weather, thoughts and feelings at the time of the event.

Events should be recalled in a different chronological order to the origninal sequence such as from the end to the beginning or from the middle to the end to the beginning.

This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events.

It also prevents people from being dishonest as it is harder for people to produce an untruthful account if they have to reverse it.

Try to recall the event from different people's perspective such as the offenders point of view.

This is done to disrupt the effect of expectations and schema on recall.

Fisher et al. (1987) developed some additional elements of the cognitive interview to seek to build a trusting relationship between the interviewer and the witness in order to improve the quality of communication between the two.

Important extra features include:

• The interviewer not distracting the witness with unnecessary interuptions/questions
• The witness controlling the flow of information
• Asking open-ended questions
• Getting the witness to speak slowly
• Reminding the witness to say 'I don't know' rather than guessing details
• Reducing anxiety in witnesses

STRENGTH

Some elements of the full cognitive interview are useful.

Milne and BUll (2002) found that each individual element of the CI was equally valuble.

However, they also found that a combination of 'report everything' and 'context reinstatement' produced better recall than any other techniques individually.

So at least these two elements should be used to improve police interviewing of eyewitnesses even if the full CI is not used.

STRENGTH

The support for the effectiveness of the enhanced cognitive interview has been proven by a meta-analysis by Kohnken et al. (1999) where they combined data from 50 studies.

The enhanced CI consistently provided more correct information than a standard police interview used by police.

Studies like this indicate that there are real practical benefits to the police using the enhanced version of the cognitive interview.

LIMITATION

The cognitive interview is very time conuming and the police are reluctant to use it as a method of interviewing eyewitnesses because it takes up much more time than a standard police interview.

More time is needed to establish rapport with the witnesses to allow them to relax.

Kebball and Wagstaff (1997) point out that the CI also requires special training and many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours.

This means that is it unlikely that the proper version of the CI is actually used.

LIMITATION

The CI has produced an increased amount of inaccurate information whereas the techniques of the CI aim to increase the amounts of CORRECT information recalled, but the recall of incorrect information may also be increased.

Kohnken et al. (1999) found an 82% increase in correct information but also a 61% increase in incorrect information when the enhanced CI was compared to a standard interview.

This increase in correct information implies that police should continue to use the CI.

However, the results also suggest that police need to treat all information collected with caution.

Cognitive interview- A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve memories that are more accurate. It uses four main techniques, all based on well-established psychological knowledge of human memory- report everything, reinstate the context, reverse the order, and change perspective.