Summary: Enhancing Older Adult Eyewitness Memory
With the Cognitive Interview
In this article, the experimenters looked at older adult's memory to see if deficits exist (Mello & Ronald, 1995). A social stigma is attached to older adults regarding memory problems. Jurors and young people both believe that older individuals have poor memory and this often leads to the generalization that they are also bad eyewitnesses. Older adults are at a higher risk for crimes like being robbed or raped. It is scary to think that older people are more at risk to be victims of these crimes and that they suffer from memory problems. This could lead to the older eyewitness not being able to identify the perpetrator or accusing the wrong person.
This article also dealt with the cognitive interview. The researchers constructed a modified version of the cognitive interview tailored it to older individuals needs. Three interviewing techniques were used: the cognitive interview, a modified version of the cognitive interview, and the standard police interview. The cognitive interview yielded more information than the standard interview without a reduction in accuracy rate. There was no difference found between the cognitive interview and the modified version.
The cognitive interview is based on memory retrieval, general cognition, social dynamics, and communication. These techniques enrich eyewitness's memory by recreating the original encoding context by minimizing background noise, and ensuring the comfort of witnesses. The normal cognitive interview has eyewitnesses describe the events from a different person's perspective: older people have a hard time running two metal processes at once and are not good at perspective taking therefore is exempt from the modified version.
Another reason way the standard police interview does not facilitate to older eyewitness's memory is because police officers conduct the interviews too quickly and require the witness to listen and search their memory which is also hard for older adults. Cognitive interviews are given at a much slower pace and ensure the witness is comfortable and not rushed. Although, the cognitive interview takes longer, it is well worth it.
by MS
In my other post regarding cognitive interviews in general, I mentioned a need for caution regarding incorrect information produced by a witness during the interview process. While caution must be exerted, the article regarding the use of the cognitive interview for older witnesses is a notion that I feel makes intuitive sense. Take more time, do not interupt, let them attempt to retrieve the information under a more relaxed situation in which they don't feel pressured and hurried. The fact that it works better for older than younger witnesses does not necessarily mean that, aside from issues regarding incorrect information produced, younger witnesses wouldn't benefit from a similar type of interview. The standard interview seems problematic for other reasons, which could still be present when interviewing younger witnesses. I did like this article, but it is also limited by how much we can conclude about "older" people based on the sample examined here. Older college students or educated people who are still actively engaging their minds and memories will probably be different than those who do not exercise their brains as often. The authors mention this limitation, which is responsible reporting, but it was one of the things I noticed first and foremost when reading about their sample, and kept thinking to myself, "why not just get a sample from a retirement community, after all, the study was done in Florida!"
I chose this article because I also had the idea that elderly people had memory deficits and could not be as reliable in eyewitness identification and in interviews as younger people. This experiment basically showed both age groups a video of a robbery and asked them to narrate it to interviewers based on three different types of interview styles. The styles of interviewing were the standard police interview, a cognitive interview (which gave the participants longer time and stresses to tell ALL memories), and an interview made for elderly people which gave them an even more set of time and more pauses between the questions. After the experiment was done, the results showed that there was no performance difference in older and younger adults, the cognitive interviews obtained more information, and the cognitive interview is more valuable when interviewing older adults than younger ones. The cognitive interview designed for the elderly did not show any improvements either compared to the standard and other cognitive interview, which I found interesting because that is the main concentration in the article.
I think that this is a hard experiment to obtain results from because of the participants they used and other variables. The participants were all higher functioning individuals that are probably smarter and more aware then other people of the same age. Also, I agree with the section in the discussion about how they should be testing verbal ability and recall instead of the age of the individuals. This article was somewhat informative on the problems of eyewitness identification and ways to fix the problem. Even though this article states that there is no difference in elderly and younger eyewitness memory, it did not convince me entirely. KC
According to previous research, older adult eye witnesses tend to give less accurate and less complete reports compared with younger adults. I agreed with the idea that older people tend to have memory problems and that these memory problems often affect their testimony, making them less able to provide a complete/accurate testimonies. Jurors were also said to share this viewpoint. Older adults may also tend to hold back information because they tend to be overly cautious. This article presented an idea that deficiencies in memory can be reduced or even eliminated when using proper instructions, retrieval cues, etc.
CI=cognitive interview. CI is based on memory retrieval, principles of general cognition, social dynamics, and communication. SI=standard interview. This type of interview brings about less communication.
The CI interview technique consisted of recreating the original encoding context, reducing background noise, asking open ended questions, and encouraging non-verbal responses. It was hypothesized that the CI may be just as effective for older adults as it is for younger adults, which has a high success rate. This was hypothesized due to the fact that young and old adults have similar information processing limitations.
A modified version of the cognitive interview (CI-M) was developed in hopes of enhancing the recollection of older adult eyewitnesses. Some of the modifications included slowing down the interview pace, making and effort to ask simple & direct questions, making point to avoid interrupting the eyewitness, etc.
The SI, CI, and CI-M were compared in the study. There were 50 participants in the study; they were broken down into different groups. Each participant viewed a 4min long video of a convenience store robbery, filled out a questionnaire for 30min, were given 2 filler tasks to complete, individually interview about the video tape scene (the interview was recorded for scoring purposes), the participants gave a confidence rating, completed a 25 vocabulary test, and were then debriefed.
The results showed that the CI had a significant advantage over the SI, and that this difference showed to be greater for older participants. The CI required more time, received more correct responses, more errors, and was overall superior to SI, and age had no effect. There was no significant difference between the CI and CI-M for the older adults. This was surprising to me, as I thought the CI-M would receive better results from older adults. The confidence ratings were shown to be unchanging due to age, but there was a correlation found between older ages and having a higher vocabulary score. Overall this study showed that there were no performance difference due to age, that CI brought forth more information than the SI did, and that CI was overall more valuable for both older and younger adults.
SD