AQA Psychology for A Level Year 1 & AS - Student Book
High quality in-class notes with 4 detailed evaluation paragraphs on the Cognitive Interview for AQA A-level Psychology. In-depth notes on each of the key components as well information on the enhanced cognitive interview. Everything you need for a 8 or 16 mark essay.
Psychology – Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Cognitive Interview
Cognitive Interview – A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve
more accurate memories. Features of the cognitive interview:
No standard questions.
No time limit.
Interviewer normally remains silent.
Open ended and non-leading questions.
Memories can be retrieved and context dependent based.
Ronald Fisher and Edward Geiselman argued that eyewitness testimony could be
improved if the police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses. There are
four main parts of the cognitive interview:
1) Report everything – witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of
the event, even though they may seem irrelevant, they may trigger other
important memories.
2) Reinstate the context – the witness should return to the original crime scene in
their mind and imagine the environment (weather, what they could see etc) and
their emotions (happy, bored etc). This is related to context-dependent
forgetting.
3) Reverse the order – events should be recalled in a different order from the
original sequence. This prevents people reporting their expectations of how the
event must have happened and it also prevents dishonesty.
4) Change perspective – witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s
perspectives. E.g. how it would have appeared to other witnesses or to the
perpetrator. This also disrupts the effect of expectations of how the event
happened and the effect of schema on recall. E.g. schema for a particular setting,
such as a shop.
The enhanced cognitive interview:
Fisher added some additional elements into the cognitive interview. These include:
When to establish eye contact and when not to.
How to reduce eyewitness anxiety.
How to minimise distractions.
How to make sure witnesses speak slowly.
Ask open-ended questions.
Evaluation:
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