Cognitive interview

• Cognitive interview

  Geisleman et al developed as a response to criticisms of police interviews

  4 principles that enhance recall
• Cognitive interview: report everything

  Encouraged to include every detail of event even if seems irrelevant as may trigger other memories
• Cognitive interview: Reinstate context

  mentally recalls crime scene, imagines environment and their emotions

  Cues from context trigger recall(context-dependent forgetting)
• Cognitive interview: Reverse order

  Recall events in different chronological order

  Prevents dishonesty and expectations of how it happened rather then how it actual happened
• Cognitive interview: Change perspective

  Recall from others perspective

  Prevents influence of expectations ans schema on recall
• Cognitive interview: Fisher et al

  developed additional element- enhanced cognitive interview

  Includes focus on social dynamics of interaction and ideas of reducing anxiety,minimising distractions
• Strength of CI: Elements are useful

  • Milne + Bull found that each individual element of CI was equally valuable
  • Also found that a combo of report everything + reinstate context produced better recall than any other technique individually
  • Suggests that 2 of these elements should be used to improve police interviewing of witnesses even if full CI not used
• Strength of CI: support for Enhanced CI

  • Meta analysis by Kohnken combined data from 50 studies
  • Enhanced CI consistently provided more correct info than standard interview used by police
  • Indicates there is real practical benefits to police of using enhanced version of CI
• Limitation of CI: Time consuming

  • Police reluctant to use as takes more time than standard police interview
  • Also requires special training + many forces may not be able to provide more than a few hrs
  • Means unlikely that then proper version of CI is actually used by police