cognitive interview

• cognitive interview introduced by Fisher and Geiselman uses psychological techniques to improve memory recall of standard police interviews for eyewitness testimonies
• 4 condition in CI are report everything, reinstate context, reverse order, change perspective
• additional cognitive enhanced interview
• report everything includes witnesses reporting everything they seen, even if they are not confident, trivial information may result in recall of other memories
• rapport must be established with these 4 techniques
• reinstate the context includes witness returning to original environment of the scene to experience same emotions and imagine the event, allows context dependent cues to give rise to more memory recall
• reverse the order includes witness changing the order of the vet when recalling, this ensures that the witness is not recalling the event on their expectations and identifies any dishonest account as its hard to lie and reverse
• change perspective includes recalling event in perspective of perpetuator or the victim , this allows more information to be gathered and ensures that the witness is not relying on their schema or expectations
• enhanced cognitive interview by fisher includes techniques to improve the social dynamic of interview such as anxiety reducing techniques, telling witness to talk slowly, open ended questions
• strength is research support of CI, meta analysis by kohnken combined data from 55 studies comparing CI with standard police interview, CI gathered 49% more info than standard police interview, only 4 studies showed no difference, shows that CI is effective in helping witnesses access information
• weakness is that some elements of CI are more useful than others, studies show combining report everything and reinstate context gathered most information in comparison to the other techniques individually or combined, this doubts credibility of overall CI because some of the techniques are less effective
• weakness is its time consuming, police are reluctant to use CI as it takes more time than standard interview to build rapport, CI takes special training which can only be provided for a few hours as police station do not have the resources, suggests complete CI is not realistic for police to use