Psychology & Law 2000words essay
Sharonhy
CognitiveInterviewing.pptxCognitive Interviewing
The Expert:
The Background:
Modern police investigations in Britain rightly place great emphasis on witness evidence, as a result of miscarriages of justice associated with false confessions. However, the fallibility of human memory demands that witnesses are interviewed appropriately in order to prevent fresh miscarriages caused by unreliable witness evidence.
A significant body of laboratory research has shown that the cognitive interview (CI) and enhanced cognitive interview (ECI), which were developed to improve police interviews with witnesses, are superior to the standard police interview in obtaining reliable information from victims and witnesses.
However, as well as understanding the cognitive interview (CI) and enhanced cognitive interview (ECI) models any consultant seeking to advise investigators about the real world application of these techniques also needs an understanding of the broader issues, both historic and contemporary, that impact on their successful use within a real life investigation.
Griffiths and Milne 2010 The Application of Cognitive Interview Techniques as Part of an Investigation
The Background:
The assertion that witnesses are central to the solving of crime (Stewart, 1985) is unequivocally accepted by stakeholders across all areas of criminal justice, as evidenced when reading academic literature, government policy or police training manuals.
For example, published research from both America and the United Kingdom shows that police officers in both countries agree that witnesses most often produce the crucial leads in cases (Sanders, 1986; Kebbell & Milne, 1998).
In the United Kingdom where, due to miscarriages of justice associated with false confessions (see Gudjonsson, 2003), prosecution witness evidence is viewed as more important than a suspect’s confession (Wolchover & Heaton-Armstrong, 1996), the government recently invested £36 million in the ‘No witness, no justice’ programme (Criminal Justice Service, 2004). This programme was initiated after identifying that 15% of all ineffective trials in 2002/03 were the result of prosecution witnesses refusing or failing to give evidence.
The Murder Investigation Manual (ACPO, Centrex, 2006), which determines best practice for the most serious investigations in England and Wales, explicitly states that ‘the success of any homicide investigation depends largely on the accuracy and detail of the material obtained from witnesses’ (p.198).
Miscarriages of justice
What faulty interview techniques lead to this miscarriage of justice?
- Excellent documentary for those who have not seen it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97DSyF_Z3Do
https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/ronald-cotton/
The Theory:
Balanced against this belief in the importance of witness information is the long standing contention that witness memory is fallible (Munsterburg, 1908). Indeed, the latest advice offered to the criminal justice system by the British Psychological Society (Conway & Holmes, 2008, p.2) emphasises that –
“Memory is a constructive process that is prone to error and is easily influenced by the recall environment, including police interviews.
Memory is a record of a person’s experiences of events and not a record of the events themselves. Memories should not be compared to a visual or audio recording.
Memories for experienced events are always incomplete. Any witness account will include forgotten details and gaps. An account that does not feature gaps or omissions is highly unusual.
Recall of any number of specific details is not a guarantee of accuracy and independent corroboration should always be sought.
The content of memory comes from a witnesses’ comprehension of the experience, both conscious and unconscious. This content can be modified by the process of recall.
Memory can be confabulated. People can remember events that they have not experienced through a blend of different, but similar events.
Memories for traumatic experiences, childhood events, memory in younger children, older people and vulnerable people all have special features”.
Video: Please watch and take notes on this video on cognitive interviewing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGRNWM8RvGQ&t=3s
The Technique
The CI is based upon two theoretical principles of memory. The first of these is the multicomponent view of a memory trace (Tulving, 1974), which states that memory is a network of associations. Thus, a memory trace maybe accessed via several paths, using different retrieval cues. Accordingly, if memory is not recovered via one type of retrieval cue then it maybe accessed by another (Tulving, 1974).
The second theoretical principle is the encoding specificity principle which states that memory is context dependent and thus, effective retrieval is facilitated by the feature overlap of the retrieval cue itself and both the information and the context of the encoded input trace (Tulving & Thomson, 1973).
The original cognitive interview comprised of four individual mnemonics (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992; Clifford & Memon, 1999; Köhnken et al, 1999; Milne & Bull, 1999; Dando & Milne, in press) designed to enhance memory retrieval of witnesses and victims of crime.
The Technique: 1. Context reinstatement
The first of the CI mnemonics is context reinstatement and is thought by some to be the most important part of the cognitive interview (e.g. Clifford & Memon, 1999; Davis, McMahon & Greenwood, 2004). This instruction asks the witness to mentally reconstruct both the physical and personal features of the witnessed event. This would include the physical description of the scene and the sensory features such as what the interviewee could hear or smell. The theory behind this technique is that any aspect (physical; environmental and personal; feelings at the time) of the witnessed event that has been encoded into memory can potentially serve as a retrieval cue which could in itself help to access memory and thus in turn improve recall of the witnessed event (Memon & Bull, 1991).
The Technique: 2. Report Everything
The second mnemonic is an instruction to the witness to “report everything”, including the smallest details, even details the interviewee thinks are not important, even partial information, also information that the interviewee is not sure about, or information that the interviewee believes the interviewer to already know. Everything that pops into the interviewees mind needs to be reported so that all the information known to the interviewee is given to the interviewer
The Technique: 3. Different personal perspectives
The third mnemonic is to ask the witness to recall the incident from a variety of different personal perspectives (i.e. different people present at the incident). (Please note that this instruction is sometimes erroneously represented as asking the interviewee to imagine being a bird circling above the incident, which it definitely is not!)
This instruction arose from research by Anderson and Pichert (1978) who asked two groups of participants to remember a detailed story from different personal perspectives: house buyer and burglar. After a delay the participants were asked to write down all they could remember about the story.
Once they had said they could not remember anything further, the participants were asked to change perspectives and attempt to recall the story from the altered perspective. It was found that the participants did recall further detail from the ‘new’ perspective.
The Technique: 4. Change the temporal order of recall instruction
The final mnemonic that constituted the original cognitive interview, is the change the temporal order of recall instruction, which is an instruction to the witness to make numerous retrieval attempts from different starting points in their account (e.g. reverse order recall). For example “I would like you to try something that can sometimes help people remember extra information. I would like you to tell me about the event but this time backwards. Let’s start with the last thing that you can remember happening. Now go back to what happened just before that, and now just before that (and so on until the start).”
The rationale for this instruction is based on the constructive nature of memory (Milne & Bull, 1999). When asked to recall an event, most witnesses will be influenced by a number of factors including prior knowledge (e.g. of the physical location or the type of incident), plus scripts (i.e. what they may expect to happen in a particular situation; e.g. what typically happens on a Friday night).
In addition, most witnesses when asked to give a free recall will do so in a relatively forward order, with some jumping about in time (Memon, 2006). In doing this the witness will use scripts and report information consistent with the script. The change order instruction causes the interviewee to examine the memory in a different way and can result in additional information being reported which is not contained within the script.
Read
Please read this short resource to sharpen your knowledge of cognitive interviewing:
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/psychology/becky-milne-explains-the-cognitive-interview
The Task
Download the cheat sheet
Watch the video from the LMU by Dr Zander – this will contain further instructions for the task
You will each get to practice cognitive interviewing
You will be placed into ‘break out rooms’ with other students and be paired up
The interviewer will use cognitive interviewing techniques on their counterpart
