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Cognitive interview., . - Coggle Diagram
Cognitive interview.
Geiselman et al developed the cognitive interview to be used in police investigations, to improve the eyewitness testimony. There are four stages.
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Report everything.
- The interviewer encourages the reporting of every single detail of the event without editing anything out, even through it may seen irrelevant.
- Memories are interconnected with one another so that recollection of one item may then cue a whole lot of other memories. In addition the recollection of small details may eventually be pieced together from many different witnesses to form a clearer picture of the event.
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Change order.
- The interviewer may try alternative ways through the timeline of the incident, for example by reversing the order in which the event occurred.
- You are encouraged to describe the event in reverse orde, or to start with an aspect of the scene which seems most memorable and work backwards of forwards from that point
Change perspective.
- The interviewee asked to recall the incident from multiple perspectives, for example by imagining how it would have appeared to other witnesses present at the time.
- This is again done to disrupt the effect that schemas have on recall.
Geiselman et al.
Procedure:
- Participants viewed a film of a violent crime and, after 48 hours, were interviewed by a policeman using one of three methods: the cognitive interview; a standard interview used by the Los Angeles Police; or an interview using hypnosis. The number of facts accurately recalled and the number of errors made were recorded.
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Findings:
The average number of correctly recalled facts for the cognitive interview was 41.2, for hypnosis it was 38.0 and for the standard interview it was 29.4. There was no significant difference in the number of errors in each condition.
Conclusion:
Conclusion: The cognitive interview leads to better memory for events, with witnesses able to recall more relevant information compared with a traditional interview method.
Kohnken et al
- Kohnke et al conducted a meta-analysis of over fifty studies and found that the cognitive interview gave consistently more information than the standard interview.
- In addition, Fisher found witnesses reported more detail when detectives used these techniques.
- This suggests it is more effective at improving the accuracy of eye witness testimonies.
- In addition, it does not guarantee accuracy. Research has found that it is better at producing a larger quantity of information, but no quality.
- Therefore, all information provided by this interview should still be treated with caution.
- It has been proven that it increases 61% of incorrect information, thus decreasing the accuracy of EWT. Therefore, the technique may lack internal validity.
After the findings revealed that eyewitness account can unreliable. Researchers attempted to devise methods to improve memory retrieval.
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