The cognitive interview

• Fisher and Geiselman argued eyewitness testimony could be improved if the police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses.
• Cognitive interview = a method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories.
• There are four main techniques that are used:

  1. report everything
  2. reinstate the context
  3. reverse the order
  4. change perspective
• Report everything:

  Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even if it seems irrelevant or the witness doesn't feel confident about it. Seemingly trivial details may be important or they may trigger other important memories.
• Reinstate the context:

  The witness should return to the original crime scene 'in their mind' and imagine the environment and their emotions. This is related to context-dependent forgetting.
• Reverse the order:

  Events should be recalled in a different order to the original sequence. This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than reporting the actual events. It also prevents dishonesty.
• Change perspective:

  Witnesses should recall the incident from other people's perspectives. For example, how it would have appeared to other witnesses or the perpetrator. This is done to disrupt the effects of expectations and the effect of schema on recall. The schema you have for a particular setting generates expectations of what would have happened and it is the schema that is recalled rather than what actually happened.
• Fisher et al. developed some additional elements to the CI to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction (the enhanced cognitive interview). For example, the interviewer needs ti know when to establish eye contact and when to relinquish it.
• The enhanced cognitive interview also includes ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions.
• A meta-analysis by Köhnken combined data from 55 studies comparing the CI with the standard police interview. The CI gave an average 41% increase in accurate information. Only four studies in the analysis showed no difference between the interviews. This shows the CI is an effective technique in helping witnesses recall information that is stored in memory but not immediately accessible.
• However, Köhnken also found an increase in the amount of inaccurate information recalled by participants. This was a particular issue in the ECI. Cognitive interviews may sacrifice quality of EWT for quantity. This means police officers should treat eyewitness evidence from CIs with caution.
• Not all elements of the CI are equally effective or useful. Milne and Bull found that each of the four techniques used alone produced more information than the standard police interview. But they also found that using a combination or report everything and reinstate the context produced better recall than any of the other elements or combination of them. This confirmed police's suspicions that some aspects of the CI are more useful than others. This casts some doubt on the credibility of the overall CI.
• Police officers may be reluctant to use the CI because it takes more time and training than the standard police interview. More time is required to establish rapport with a witness and allow them to relax. The CI also requires special training and many forces do not have the resources to provide more than a few hours. This suggests the CI is not a realistic method for police officers to use and it might be better to focus on just a few key elements.