Browsing by Subject "muistitekniikka"

Cognitive Interview (CI) was designed to help eyewitnesses remember what they witnessed in greater detail. The CI has been widely researched ever since its’ development and nowadays there are even more than just one type of CI. The so far most researched variant is Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI). Then there is also Modified Cognitive Interview (MCI). Both the CI and the ECI include four mnemonics: context reinstatement, report all, change order and change perspective. Additionally, the ECI also includes rapport building, unlike the CI. The aim of this thesis is to examine whether an MCI can be used in a way that preserves the benefits of the CI. The thesis will also assess whether the MCI takes statistically significantly less time to conduct in comparison to the full ECI. Previous studies have suggested that the change order and change perspective mnemonics would be less useful in comparison to the other two mnemonics. The articles used in this thesis were searched from the Helsinki University Library’s Helka-database using the following keywords: “cognitive interview”, ” memory” and “modified” or “cognitive interview”, ” eyewitness” and ”memory” or ”cognitive interview”, ”enhancing” and ”recall” or ”memory” and ”confabulation” or ”age”, ”memory” and ”education”. Some of the sources were also found via the already chosen articles by entering the source into Pubmed- and Psycinfo-databases. It was found that the CI, ECI and MCI all produce more information in comparison to other interviewing methods used to interview witnesses. However, the ECI and the MCI seemed to also produce the most memory confabulations. The view, that both the change perspective and change order mnemonics are the least useful when interviewing eyewitnesses, was supported by the results. The change perspectives mnemonic can also be considered problematic when it comes to legal proceedings, as it can be viewed as hearsay evidence. The MCI was found to take statistically significantly less time to conduct when compared to the full ECI, when both the change order and change perspective mnemonics were omitted. This is an important finding since a shorter interview would save resources. However, the shortened MCI should be used with caution since it does inflict more memory confabulations in comparison to other methods. Therefore, the MCI should only be used when limited resources rule out the use of the full ECI.