Testing the efficacy of the cognitive interview in a developing country

Abstract

Prior research has shown that the cognitive interview (CI) can be used to elicit a more complete and accurate report from eyewitnesses, but the bulk of the research has involved testing witnesses with high levels of education. In the present experiment, we examined whether the CI was effective with witnesses who were not college educated. Employees of the cleaning service of a University in Brazil witnessed a simulated armed abduction. They were then interviewed with a CI or standard interview (SI). Replicating earlier research, there was a significant increase in the number of correct details reported when witnesses were interviewed using CI with no cost to accuracy. This experiment provides the first test of the CI in a developing country and the implications for police interviewing practices in Latin America will be discussed.The cognitive interview (CI) is one of the most exciting developments in forensic psychology in the last 20 years. It comprises a series of memory retrieval techniques designed to increase the amount of information that can be obtained from an eyewitness. It can help investigators obtain a more complete and accurate report from interviewees. The CI is based upon known psychological principles of remembering and retrieval of information from memory. To date, some 65 empirical studies of CI have been conducted, however, almost every study with adults has used an educated sample (university students) as interviewees and the to-be-remembered events tend to be fairly mundane (see Memon, in press for a recent review). The present research examines for the first time, the efficacy of the CI using a sample from a low socio-economic background with minimal education. The study is also one of the few to examine the efficacy of the CI using an emotionally charged event (a staged kidnapping involving a firearm).There were two main forces behind the development of the CI. The first was a need to improve the practices of police interviewers when gathering information from eyewitnesses (Fisher, Geiselman, & Raymond, 1987). The second was an attempt to apply psychological research on the storage and retrieval of episodic events to eyewitness memory. Elizabeth Loftus's research had already paved the way by dispelling the myth that memory operates like a video camera. She had also shown that memory research findings APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 20: 597-605 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).

Eyewitness memory: The impact of a negative mood during encoding and/or retrieval upon recall of a non-emotive event

“…A non-emotive video showing an interaction between a man and a woman was used as the tobe-remembered event. As in many eyewitness memory studies (e.g., Memon, Wark, Bull, & Koehnken, 1997;Memon, 2006, andHouston et al, 2013) correct recall of forensically relevant categories of information was assessed, focussing on two types of central detail (the physical descriptions and actions of the protagonists) and one type of peripheral detail (the event environment). From a forensic perspective, it is helpful for police interviewers to know whether or not a negative mood at encoding and/or retrieval differentially impacts upon recall of these three types of event detail.…”

Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Self‐Administered Interview© for Witnesses with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Recall was coded using Stein and Memon's (2006) scoring template, where each piece of information was classified as a Person (P), Action (A), Surrounding (S) or Object (O) detail.…”

Münsterberg's legacy: What does eyewitness research tell us about the reliability of eyewitness testimony?

“…Nevertheless the staged event procedure and more recently the use of video-taped scenarios has enabled researchers to simulate a variety of witnessing conditions that are not that far removed from the kinds of experiences an individual may encounter as a victim or witness in the real world. For example, Stein and Memon (2006) recently simulated an abduction in which the victim was kidnapped, held at gunpoint, and robbed before being released by several perpetrators. The witnesses in the study were the cleaning staff of the university and they were interviewed with a procedure, the Cognitive Interview, that has been found to increase the number of correctly reported details (Köhneken, Milne, Memon, & Bull, 1999).…”

“…To increase the ecological validity of our study, our control interview was modelled upon the typical police procedure employed in Brazil. One limitation of the Stein and Memon (2006) study was the witnesses could only be subjected to stress using a videotaped simulation and hence the impact of personal threat on eyewitness performance could not be examined.…”