cognitive interview

• Cognitive interview

  A method of interviewing eye-witnesses to help them produce more accurate recall of a crime scene using techniques based on psychological research
• Eye-witness accounts are often unreliable and easily distorted by the way questions are asked
• The police have developed new methods of interviewing which try to address some of these issues
• Cognitive interview

  Designed to improve witness' recall by using research into how memory works
• Cognitive interview

  • Developed by Fisher & Geiselman (1992)
  • Includes 4 main techniques: Report everything, Reinstate the context, Reverse the order, Change perspective
• Report everything

  The witness is encouraged to report every single detail of the event, even information that might seem unimportant or irrelevant
• Reinstate the context

  The witness is asked to imagine all aspects of the crime scene, such as what the weather was like, the time of day and how they felt during the event
• Reverse the order

  The witness describes what they saw in a different chronological order, eg from the end to the beginning, or from a midway point in the account
• Change perspective

  The witness is asked to 'tell the story' of the event from someone else's perspective, such as a different witness or someone who was directly involved
• Enhanced cognitive interview

  • Pays more attention to aspects of the interaction between interviewer and interviewee, such as maintaining eye contact, reducing distractions, asking open-ended questions, and getting the witness to speak slowly
• The first 2 techniques in the cognitive interview (report everything and reinstate the context) are based on the encoding specificity principle, first proposed by Tulving (1983)
• The other 2 cognitive interview techniques (reverse the order and change perspective) are related to the concept of a schema
• Encoding specificity principle

  The idea that when a memory for an event is first encoded, other important cues are stored alongside it, such as details of the context and the person's emotional state
• Schema

  Having a schema for certain events, eg a bank robbery, means that our memory for events may be based more on what we expected to happen, rather than what actually did happen
• The cognitive interview techniques make it harder for witnesses to rely on schema when recounting the sequence of events, and also makes it harder to lie
• Cognitive interview

  • Evidence suggests it is more effective than standard interview techniques
  • Geiselman et al (1985) showed the average number of correctly recalled facts was higher for the cognitive interview compared to standard interview and hypnosis
• A weakness of the cognitive interview is that it may also lead to an increase in the recall of inaccurate information
• Kohnken et al (1999) found an 85% increase in correct information using cognitive interview techniques but this was offset by a 61% increase in incorrect information, compared with standard interview methods
• The real strength of the cognitive interview is that more information is produced overall but a lot of it may be inaccurate
• Cognitive interview


  • Milne and Bull (2002) observed that a combination of 'report everything' and 'context reinstatement' was most effective in eliciting accurate information
• The cognitive interview is time-consuming and the police can use abridged versions in some circumstances
• Kohnken et al (1999) meta-analysis found a 34% increase in correct information generated using the cognitive interview compared with standard interview techniques, but also an increase in incorrect information
• The studies in the Kohnken et al (1999) meta-analysis which used a staged offence with actors elicited more accurate recall compared to those studies which assessed recall of a video
• Milne and Bull (2002) found that recall was significantly more correct when participants were interviewed using a combination of the 'report everything' and 'mental reinstatement' components of the cognitive interview, compared to the other components used individually or a control group
• Kebbell and Wagstaff (1999) found that police officers report the cognitive interview requires more time than is often available, and they prefer to use strategies to limit an eyewitness' report to the minimum amount of information necessary
• Loftus and Palmer's research into the effect of misleading questions on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony supports the cognitive interview's assumption that memories are actively reconstructed to fit individual's schemas and expectations