ewt:cognitive interview

• limitation is that police officers can be reluctant to use CI as it takes more time and training than a standard interview. This means that more time is needed to rapport time with a witness and allow them to relax. CI also requires special training which some forces do not have the resources to provide more than a few hours of the training. This suggests that the complete CI is not a realistic method for all police offers and for them to just focus on free useful elements.
• ECI

  Fisher developed additional elements which focused on the social dynamics. This can include eye contact, minimising anxiety and distractions, getting the witnesses to speak slowly and asking open ended questions.
• limitation of CI is not all elements of it are useful. Milne and Bull 2002 found that each of the 4 techniques used alone produce more information than a standard police interview. They also found that a combination of reporting everything and reinstate the context produced better recall than the other elements or a combination of them. This confirmed police officers' suspicions that other elements are better than others. This casts some doubt of the overall cognitive interview.
• strength of CI is that it works. Meta analyst Kohnken 1999 combined 55 pieces of data from different studies comparing CI with a standard police interview. The CI gave a 41% increase in accurate information given by the witness compared to the standard interview. Only 4 studies showed no difference between the CI and the standard interview. This shows that the CI is an effective method in helping witnesses recall information that is stored in memory but not immediately accessible.
• on the other hand, Kohnken also found an increase in the inaccurate information recalled by the witnesses. This was mainly seen with the ECI rather than the CI. CI may sacrifice the quality of the EWT in favour of quantity. This means that police officers should treat evidence from ECI/ CIs with caution.
• Report everything

  Witnesses of a crime should be encouraged to report everything they have witnessed during a crime even if it does not seem relevant, as they may be important and trigger other memories.

  Reinstate the context

  Witnesses should return  to the original crime seen in their mind such as the weather, their emotions and what they could see. This is related to context-dependent forgetting.
• Reverse the order

  Events should be recalled in a different order to what they originally occurred in. This is done to help people build expectations of what they thought happened, rather than the actual event. It also helps prevent dishonesty.

  Change perspective

  Witnesses should be encouraged to recall the events from other perspectives. This is done to disrupt expectations and the schema. The schema that you have of a particular setting can create expectations of what would have happened, so the witness would be recalling what the schema expected, not what actually happened.