Summary to be provided by Sean
The Effect of the Cognitive Interview on Face Identification Accuracy: Release From Verbal Overshadowing
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I thought that the article by Finger and Pezdek (1999) was really interesting. I liked that they included the cognitive interview in their design because it was shown that the cognitive interview might cause problems when it comes to face recognition. So, we saw some of the other effects that the cognitive interview can have on face identification. However, the delay caused no significant differences between the cognitive and standard interview, so that finding needs to be taken into consideration, as well.
I liked that after running their methodology the researchers also wanted to see if there were differences between their methodology and what other researchers have done, based on their results. It was interesting to see that a delay of 24 minutes can eliminate the verbal overshadowing effect. As the article touched on, this delay does normally occur in police investigations, so the effect is less pronounced. I think that was an important point to bring up, and I agreed with it. If there is a live show up, the likelihood of the witness being able to provide a very detailed description is not very high. Also, if there is a photographic lineup, then there is a stronger possibility that more time has passed due to the investigation. I think the authors might be trying to point out that the cognitive interview is still a good method for interviewing witnesses, and it is not likely to have huge detrimental effects on identification.
Another part of this article that was interesting to me was the quasi-experimental design that was used. Classes of students were randomly assigned to conditions, instead of individual participants. They acknowledge that this may be a limitation of their results. I found this interesting because of what I have been learning about in my Research Design class. I still think their results aren’t impacted too much by this, but they maybe could have conducted some kind of pretest to demonstrate that there were no differences between the groups. Still, I think their explanation is valid, and I thought that they examined some interesting ideas in their studies.
HC
In the article by Finger and Pezdek (1999) they examined the cognitive interview and the standard police interview and their effects on verbal overshadowing. In the first experiment the effect of the cognitive interview was examined on face recognition accuracy. Previous research has found that when an eyewitness describes a face before viewing a lineup, verbal overshadowing occurs and the accuracy of identification is impaired.
In the first experiment it was found that the cognitive interview was less effective than the standard police interview and that it produced more verbal overshadowing effects. They attributed this to the fact that the cognitive interview elicits more descriptions of the face that distort original memories of the face. Two explanations were offered on what exactly occurs. Storage interpretation is when the description of a face overwrites or distorts the original memory. Retrieval interpretations are when the original memory and the description are represented together, but the original face memory is not available at the time of the test. Retrieval interpretations are more accepted than storage interpretations.
In the second experiment this effect was alleviated by delaying the description of the face at least one hour before having the subject identify the perpetrator. Allowing a one hour delay between face descriptions and identifying the culprit in both the cognitive and standard interview eliminated the decay in identification accuracy.
The third experiment had three variables. The control group did not describe the face seen, a delay group, and a non-delay group. The no description control group and the delay group had the same face identification accuracy. It was concluded that twenty four minutes of delay is sufficient enough to compromise the effects of verbal overshadowing.
All of these findings are important because the cognitive interview is used more and more by police stations and the FBI, so negative aspects need to be considered. The good part about the findings is they don’t create a large problem because the eyewitness is not usually asked to give a description and then look at a lineup and ID the person. But, it is good to know that if that was the case, officers would know to delay the lineup identification at least twenty four minutes after the witness gave a verbal description to eliminate this problem.