Testing the Efficacy of the Cognitive Interview in a Developing Country

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Testing the Efﬁcacy of the Cognitive Interview in a

Developing Country

LILIAN MILNITSKY STEIN

1

* and AMINA MEMON

2

1

Pontiﬁcal Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

2

University of Aberdeen, Scotland

SUMMARY

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. Copyright#2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/acp.1211

*Correspondence to: Lilian M. Stein, Faculdade de Psicologia, PUCRS, Av. Ipiranga, 6681, predio 11, sala 933, Porto Alegre, RS CEP 90619-900, Brazil. E-mail: [email protected]

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could be applied in real world settings (e.g. Loftus, 1983; Loftus, Keating, & Manber, 1984). Loftus drew attention to the importance of eyewitness evidence in the early eighties (e.g. Loftus & Ketcham, 1983; Loftus & Monahan, 1980) creating a favourable climate for research on techniques for improving the reliability and completeness of eyewitness reports.

Loftus’s pioneering research on the malleability of memory reports (Loftus, Altman, & Geballe, 1975) had been published 10 years prior to the birth of the CI in the same police science journal where Geiselman et al. (1984) published the ﬁrst empirical test of the CI. With relatively little training, cognitive interviewers obtained up to 35% more correct details about simulated events than untrained interviewers with no increase in the number of errors (Geiselman, Fisher, MacKinnon, & Holland, 1985). This result was replicated in numerous studies in which both children and adults were witnesses (see Ko¨hnken, Milne, Memon, & Bull, 1999 for a meta-analysis). More recently, the CI has been found to increase the reporting of correct details in adults with learning disabilities as witnesses (Milne, Clare, & Bull, 1999), senior citizens (Mello & Fisher, 1996; Wright & Holliday, 2005) and in children of preschool age (Holliday, 2003).

The CI represents the alliance of two ﬁelds of study: Cognition and Communication. The original version drew heavily upon what psychologists know about the way in which we remember things. For example, the notion that a retrieval cue is effective to the extent that there is an overlap between the encoded information and the retrieval cue (Flexser & Tulving, 1978) and that reinstatement of the original encoding context increases the accessibility of stored information (Tulving & Thomson’s Encoding Speciﬁcity Hypothesis; Tulving & Thomson, 1973) was built into the interview procedure. Thus, instructions are used to get the witness to mentally reconstruct the physical and personal contexts that existed at the time of the crime. Witnesses are asked to provide a complete report without screening out any irrelevant or partial information. The ‘report everything’ technique can yield additional information that could be valuable in linking details from different witnesses to the same crime. An eyewitness who provides more details is also judged to be more credible in the courtroom (Bell & Loftus, 1989). Recent research suggests that the report everything instruction in combination with context reinstatement yields the highest number of correct details (Milne & Bull, 2002).

The CI interviewer also asks the witness to recall in a variety of orders from the end, or from the middle or from the most memorable event (Geiselman & Callot, 1990) and occasionally from different perspectives (but see Kebbell, Milne, & Wagstaff, 2001). A recent study in which the change order and perspective techniques was replaced with an additional free recall attempt found the CI remained effective in increasing correct recall (Davis, McMahon, & Greenwood, 2005).

Fisher and Geiselman (1992) revised the original CI to include techniques for effectively communicating with the witness. Again Loftus’s earlier research had highlighted the importance of communication in applied settings (Loftus et al., 1984). CI interviewers ‘transfers control’ to the interviewees by explicitly telling them that it is they who hold the information and thus they should take charge of the interview. This practice confers power and status to the interviewees. The interviewers ensure that the interviewees are not interrupted and let them dictate the pace of the interview, which also confers that what the interviewees have to say is important. Finally, whenever possible the interviewers use open-ended questions. The effect of transfer of control is a more fruitful memory search and more effective use of context reinstatement (Memon & Stevenage, 1996).

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The current research was motivated in part by the aim of introducing the CI to police forces in Brazil. In order to conduct an ecologically valid test of the CI, it was necessary to look at the background of the typical victim and witness in Brazil and use an appropriate sample. The vast majority of witnesses in Brazil and in most other countries in Latin America come from very poor backgrounds and so fall into the low socio-economic status category. Moreover, only a very small number will have been educated to college level (only 3.46% of the Brazilian population has college level education according to the 2000 report of IBGE, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). Thus, the question arises whether the existing research on the CI could have applications in a developing country such as Brazil.

METHOD

The effects of interview condition (Cognitive or Structured) on total correct recall, errors, confabulations and suppositions were examined using a between-subjects design.

Participants

Sixty-four women participated in the study (M age¼36 years). They were randomly recruited from the cleaning service staff of a large private university in the south of Brazil. They were allowed by the University administration to participate in the study during their working hours. They were told they would be participating in research about eye witnesses. Sixty per cent of them had only completed elementary school. They were all from a low socio-economic background.1

The event

Participants viewed one of two target events (video A or video B). Each video depicted a simulated abduction of about 1-minute in duration with no soundtrack. They portrayed a young woman abducted by three men in a car. The abductors drove off with the victim in the car. Inside the car, one of the men held a gun to the victim the entire time. The woman was clearly terriﬁed. The main abductor removed items from her purse while pointing the gun at her. The same characters and car were portrayed in the two videos. The main differences were the inclusion in video A of a brief clip showing the woman walking towards the car before being abducted. In video B one of the men got out of the car while the two others remained inside. There were two versions of the event scenario in order that witnesses would believe that we were showing different events to different witnesses but it also enabled us to check that our results generalised across the two versions. The videos were professionally made by a local television station that authorised their use for the present research.

Interviewers and interviews

In a typical witness-interviewing situation in Brazil, the interviewer is almost always a man. Thus, four male undergraduate research assistants served as the interviewers after

1

There is some evidence from past research that effective use of the CI techniques might rely on verbal intelligence of the witnesses (Mello & Fisher, 1996). Since intelligence measures were not included in our study, we have no evidence on how it might have impacted our results. Further research with CI should include such measures.

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undergoing a training program over a 3-month period. Two of the interviewers were trained in the CI and the other two in the standard interview (SI).

The revised (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992) version of the CI was used here (see Introduction for description).

Training in the CI followed the general guidelines described in Ko¨hnken (1995). Initially, the trainees participated in an intensive 3-day workshop on the CI held by one of the authors (Memon) in Brazil. The trainees were instructed on the basic principles of the CI and observed demonstrations of the correct techniques to implement and errors to avoid. The trainees conducted several practice interviews, these were video-recorded and the interviewers received extensive feedback.

The SI basically followed the Brazilian police protocol for interviewing witnesses. The SI contained direct questions to get information about the events on the video, speciﬁcally on who, where, when, and how the events happened. The questioning sequence for most topics started with an open-ended question followed by closed questions to elicit targeted information that was not recalled. The interviewer was in charge of the questioning, interrupting the witness whenever more detailed information was needed. For example, if the witness was describing an action inside the car, the interviewer might interrupt and asked for a speciﬁc description of the car, like colour or make. The SI training also included some theoretical background on the Brazilian Penal Code and in court observation of witnesses being interviewed by the judge and the prosecution. The trainees then conducted several practice interviews. Both the CI and SI interviewers were blind to the video content. The practice video presented a real life shooting of a pickpocket in a busy downtown area, an event that was quite different from the main study.

Procedure

The experiment was held in two phases. In phase 1, after signing the research consent form, participants were randomly assigned to watch one of the videos about the abduction simulation. Participants watched the video in pairs. They were seated approximately 150 cm from the video screen and told they would be shown a short videotape with no sound. Participants were asked to return after 1 week for the second phase of the study. Participants were asked not to discuss the content of the video with anyone. In phase 2, each participant was randomly assigned to one of the two interviewers (CI or SI) and individually interviewed. The CI took around 40 minutes and the SI was approximately 20 minutes long. Each interview was audio and video recorded for later transcription and scoring.

Coding and scoring

The coding scheme was based on an exhaustive listing of details of each video by three independent viewers. Following earlier research in the ﬁeld (Milne & Bull, 2002; Memon, Bull, & Smith, 1995; Memon, Wark, Holley, Bull, & Ko¨hnken, 1997), the details were then classiﬁed into four categories: person (for example, man with the gun was fat), action (e.g. man 2 runs toward the woman), object (white car) and location (deserted street). The coding scheme produced an exhaustive list of 188 units of information: 81 person, 56 action, 23 object and 28 location. The coding protocol included a list of the four categories of details and a scoring system. A score was assigned for correct details, incorrect details (e.g. recalling green for the colour of the white car that was in the video), confabulation (something or someone that was not part of the event, e.g. a policeman) and suppositions

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(speculations about information presented in the video, such as, ‘the girl was going to work’).

Each tape-recorded interview was transcribed verbatim. Transcription accuracy was veriﬁed by an independent research assistant comparing each transcribed protocol to the video recording of the interview. All transcribed interviews were scored for correct details, incorrect details, confabulations and suppositions by two independent evaluators, with high inter-raters agreement (Kappa¼0, 87).

RESULTS

A mixed model analyses of variance (ANOVA) was performed to examine the effects of interview (CI and SI) and type of detail (person, action, object and location) on witnesses’ performance (with repeated measures on the last factor). The dependent measures were the total number of correct details, errors, confabulations and suppositions elicited per interviewee. Post hoc analyses used Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons. An alpha level of 0.05 was used in all analyses.

Before conducting the preceding analyses, we tested for main effects for video version (A and B) and by interviewer (CI and SI) on correct and incorrect recollections. No main effects for video version were detected for both correct and incorrect details recalled (ts

(60)<1.27,p>0.05 or for interviewers (ts(29)<1.98,p>0.05).

Accuracy rates

The accuracy rates (i.e. number of correct details divided by total number of details recalled) for the CI condition (76.5%) did not differ from the SI condition (74.8%), (t

(60)¼0.60,p>0.05).

Total amount recalled

Overall, the CI elicited more recollections about the video compared to the SI, t

(60)¼4.95,p<0.001 (see Table 1). Turning only to correct information, as predicted from earlier research on the CI, the total amount of correct details reported in CI condition was larger than the SI, F(1, 60)¼23.80, p<0.001, as can be seen in Table 1. There was a signiﬁcant interaction between interview condition and type of detail, F(3, 58)¼8.72,

p<0.001. Post hoc comparison tests (ts (60)>3.47, p<0.01) showed more correct information was reported regarding actions and persons in the CI compared to the SI condition. There was no signiﬁcant difference between conditions for details about location (p>0.05) or about objects (p¼0.078).

Errors

There was no main effect of interview condition on errors (F<1), but there was a main effect of type of detail (F(3, 58)¼76.94,p<0.001). As shown in Table 1, witnesses’ made signiﬁcantly more person errors than action and object errors (p<0.001) and there was no signiﬁcant difference between location and object errors. This pattern was obtained irrespective of interview condition.

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Supposition

The analyses on the supposition data (see Table 1) yielded main effects for interview condition (F(1, 60)¼4.54, p<0.05) and detail (F(3, 58)¼24.19, p<0.001) which were qualiﬁed by an interaction between the two factors (F(3, 58)¼4.39, p<0.01). Follow-up analyses indicated that the CI produced more suppositions regarding location (t (60)¼2.65, p<0.01) and there was also a tendency for more action suppositions (p¼0.074) than the SI.

Confabulation

Finally, there were no signiﬁcant effects of interview condition or type of detail on confabulations.

Table 1. Mean number of details recalled under each interviewing condition Type of detail Interviewing condition

Cognitive interview Standard interview

M SD M SD Correct Location 3.51 1.84 3.25 1.46 Action 18.51 8.53 10.12 5.16 Object 5.00 2.14 4.22 1.47 Person 15.90 5.65 11.54 4.09 Subtotal 43.00 13.11 29.16 8.80 Errors Location 0.61 0.61 0.19 0.40 Action 1.80 1.66 1.64 1.42 Object 0.64 0.60 0.71 0.82 Person 4.54 2.96 4.25 2.69 Subtotal 7.61 3.49 6.58 3.62 Confabulation Location 0.16 0.58 0.06 0.25 Action 1.09 1.90 0.54 1.09 Object 0.00 0.00 0.03 0.18 Person 0.00 0.00 0.06 0.25 Subtotal 1.26 2.03 0.71 1.37 Supposition Location 0.54 0.72 0.16 0.37 Action 2.35 1.90 1.61 1.23 Object 0.06 0.25 0.22 0.49 Person 0.80 1.25 0.41 0.88 Subtotal 3.77 3.05 2.42 1.80 Total 55.64 15.12 39.09 10.88 _p_<_0.05;_p_<_0.01.

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DISCUSSION

The results reported here replicated the earlier laboratory research ﬁndings using college students: the CI increases the amount of correct information obtained from witnesses without reducing the accuracy of recall or increasing the number of erroneous details reported. Moreover, the CI appeared to increase the reporting of forensically relevant information. Nygaard, Feix, and Stein (2005) developed a new coding scheme for evaluating the forensic relevance in terms of Brazilian Penal Law of the details elicited with the CI in the current study. Forensic relevance was independently assessed by two judges and three lawyers. Nygaard et al. (2005) found that the CI yielded more correct forensically relevant details about persons and actions than the SI. The CI also produced forensically rich details in the current study. For example, some witnesses provided a detailed description of the man holding the gun and in a forensic setting, this would enable the police to determine which of the three abductors was armed.

The current study is the first empirical demonstration of the efficacy of the CI in a developing country. One of the practical questions that may arise when disseminating these results to investigators in countries like Brazil is the resource implications of training police officers in the use of the CI. It is clear that the quality of training is critical (Memon et al., 1995; Memon, Milne, Holley, Bull, & Ko¨hnken, 1994; Memon, Wark, Bull, & Ko¨hnken, 1997). In the current study, the college students who served as interviewers underwent an extensive training programme where they were provided with feedback on the quality of their interviews over a 3-month period. Training police officers in the use of the CI, particularly in developing countries where the current model is an interrogative or accusatory style of interviewing, is likely to be far more challenging (see Gudjonsson, 2003 for a review of the problems associated with an accusatory style of interviewing). In those countries, there are some fundamental issues regarding the rights of all citizens to be heard and respected that would have to be addressed as part of the training. For instance, in Brazil the use of torture and ill treatment remain widespread and systematic throughout the criminal justice system (Amnesty International Annual Report, 2001). A witness or victim arriving at a Brazilian police station is likely to be subjected to a series of direct questioning sessions frequently conducted by individuals with little if any training in investigative procedures. Our data suggest that investigative interview techniques such as the CI may pave the way for a new approach to interviewing witnesses in Brazil and in other developing countries. Not only will the use of the procedure maximise the amount of information that can be obtained from witnesses but also the witness-centred approach that the CI advocates has the potential to place more focus on respecting the rights of witnesses. A change in police practices will not only empower witnesses but it will also encourage more of them to come forward and give evidence. In the longer term, these changes will reduce the miscarriage of justice in countries with a similar situation as in Brazil.

Further research is required on how the quality of the interviewer and effectiveness of CI training impacts on the quality of evidence obtained during a CI in developing countries. Research that systematically varies interviewer characteristics (e.g. whether the interviewer is an authority ﬁgure, interviewer gender) and witness characteristics (level of education, socio-economic status) is also warranted. Finally, we urge researchers to examine how witness arousal, weapon presence and other subject and event factors impact the efﬁcacy of a CI.

In closing, we return to the contribution of Elizabeth Loftus to research on procedures for interviewing eyewitnesses. Her early studies on misinformation effects (e.g. Loftus

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et al., 1975) drew attention to the importance of questioning style in obtaining an accurate memory report from eyewitnesses. After three decades of research, Loftus (2003) points out that it is clear that people’s ‘memories are the sum of what they have thought, what they have been told, what they believe’ (p. 872). It is timely therefore that researchers have begun to consider whether the CI could reduce errors in witness reports even if the CI is not administered until after the post-event information has been introduced. There is evidence to suggest that the CI has the potential to reduce errors in this situation (Memon, Wark, Holley, Bull, & Ko¨hnken, 1996; Holliday & Albon, 2004) but more research on this question is needed.

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