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Techniques for Improving Eyewitness Testimony: the Cognitive Interview

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Techniques for Improving Eyewitness Testimony: the Cognitive Interview
Techniques for Improving Eyewitness Testimony: The Cognitive Interview
An eyewitness is somebody who sees an act, occurrence or happening and can give a firsthand account of the event. The police often rely on such people to provide accurate recollections of these situations in order to aid in their investigations. Research has shown however, that eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate and unreliable. It is absolutely crucial that eyewitness testimony be as accurate as possible, as there have been as many as 225 innocent people falsely convicted of crimes due to mistaken eyewitness identification (Innocence Project, 2013). Techniques such as hypnosis, line-up construction or the cognitive interview have been employed in an attempt to improve the accuracy of eyewitnesses, with varying levels of success for each. The focus of this paper is on the technique known as a cognitive interview; discussing the underlying cognitive processes involved and explaining the errors or deficiencies it corrects.
In 1975, the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation completed a study on criminal-investigations, concluding that eyewitness testimony was a significant determinant in whether or not a case was solved (RAND Corporation, 1975). A study by Elizabeth Loftus in the same year determined that if interviewers were to ask closed-ended and/or leading questions, they could to an extent influence the responses provided by the interviewee, resulting in many eyewitness reports being unreliable due to incompletion, partial construction and vulnerability to suggestions during the interviewing process (Loftus & Zanni, 1975). It wasn’t until 1984 that the cognitive interview was developed by researchers Geiselman, Fisher and their associates as a means of amending the ineffective standard interviewing techniques used up until that time. Their aim was to propose methods that would help improve the accuracy of recall in eyewitnesses, and their results distinguished that participants


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