The Cognitive Interview

• what is the cognitive interview?

  a strategy to improve the effectiveness of police interviews when questioning witnesses
• what is the first category/ needed procedure in the cognitive interview?

  Report Everything

  • the interviewee is encouraged to report every single detail of the event, even if it seems irrelevant
  • doing this may trigger other important memories
• what is the second needed procedure in the cognitive interview?

  Mental Reinstatement of Context

  • the interviewer encourages the interviewee to mentally recreate the environment (context) of the incident
  • on occasion they even take them back to the scene of the crime (if appropriate!)
• what is the third needed procedure in the cognitive interview?

  Reverse/Changing the Order

  • the interviewer may reverse the order in which events occurred so that the interviewee can create alternative pathways through the incident
  • this avoids reporting how our expectations of how the event must have happened and also prevents/inhibits dishonesty
• what is the fourth needed procedure in the cognitive interview?

  Changing the Perspective

  • the interviewee is encouraged to recall the incident from multiple perspectives (e.g. how the event must have appeared to other witnesses standing at different points at the time)
  • this is trying to avoid how schemas bias our expectations of an event (Allport and Postman 1947)
• why the enhanced cognitive interview different to the cognitive interview?

  Has some additional elements:

  • reducing eyewitness anxiety
  • minimising distractions
  • getting witness to speak slowly
  • asking open-ended questions
  • active listening
  • further training about eye contact to interviewer
• describe the aim and methods of Geiselman et al (1985)

  • to see if reinstating the context of an event will affect the accuracy of witnesses accounts
  • participants were shown a police training video of a violent crime
  • 2 days later they were interviewed about what they had seen
  • for half, the context of the event was recreated during the interview, and for the other half standard interview techniques were used
• what were the results and conclusions of the Geiselman et al (1985) study?

  • participants who had the context recreated recalled more accurate facts about the violent crime than the other half
  • concluding that recreating context during interviews will increase the accuracy of recall