The cognitive interview

• The cognitive interview was developed by Fisher in 1984 in response to criticisms of the traditional police interview.
• The standard police interview revolves around the interviewer rather than the witness, with the interviewer doing most of the talking and often asking specific questions that require forced choice answers.
• The cognitive interview is a six-mark outline, describing at least two or three techniques and explaining why they work.
• The enhanced cognitive interview is an additional technique to the standard cognitive interview.
• Special training is required for the enhanced cognitive interview.
• The enhanced cognitive interview may not be a realistic method for police officers to use due to the time and training needed to implement it.
• It may be more beneficial to focus on a few key elements within the cognitive interview and get those right, rather than attempting the complete interview.
• The enhanced cognitive interview requires more time to establish rapport with the witness and allows them to relax.
• Witnesses in a traditional police interview are often discouraged from adding extra information and the interviewer may unconsciously ask leading questions to confirm his or her beliefs about the crime.
• Fisher et al pioneered the development of several interviewing techniques that were all based on psychological principles and collectively became known as the cognitive interview.
• The techniques used in the cognitive interview are reinstate the context, report everything, change perspective, and change the order.
• Reinstate the context in the cognitive interview, witnesses are encouraged to recreate the physical and psychological environment of the original incident, reporting every detail of the event without editing anything.
• Report everything in the cognitive interview is a very detailed step-by-step account of what happened, encouraging witnesses to recall the event from multiple perspectives.
• Elements of the enhanced cognitive interview include knowing when to make eye contact and when not to make eye contact, reducing anxiety in your witness, minimizing distractions, encouraging the witness to breathe slowly, and asking open-ended questions.
• Fischer atal also developed some additional elements of the cognitive interview, focusing on the social dynamics of the situation and making the witness feel as calm and relaxed as possible, which was called the enhanced cognitive interview.
• Cognitive frameworks act on memory, filling in blanks with expectations of what should have happened.
• Cognitive frameworks are created over the course of our lives, related to experiences, objects, events, people, and help us to interpret, predict, and know how to behave in any situation.
• In an exam, you might get asked to write a question for a cognitive interview, which could be very open-ended or asked to write a question for a specific technique in the cognitive interview.
• The cognitive interview, particularly the change of perspective and the reverse the order elements, are designed to stop people from reporting their expectations and make them think about what actually happened by making them tell the story in reverse or from somebody else's perspective.
• Change perspective in the cognitive interview involves recalling the event from different perspectives, such as from the perspective of another witness, the victim, or the suspect.
• Change the order in the cognitive interview involves getting the witness to run through the events in a different order, for example from end to beginning or maybe they'll even be asked to start in the middle and go to the end or start in the middle and go to the beginning.
• Context reinstatement and recall everything in the cognitive interview are based on retrieval failure, designed to encourage you to think about every single aspect of the event no matter how small in case anything that you remember acts as a cue for something that's more vital.
• Schemas are a concept that you'll learn about when you cover the cognitive approach.