Cognitive interview

• Improving eyewitness testimonies

  Fisher and geiselman said, eyewitness testimony is could be improved if the police use better techniques

  These techniques should be based on psychological insight into how memory works.

  These techniques collectively are the cognitive interview.
• report everything

  Witnesses are encouraged to include every detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant, or the witness doesn’t feel confident about it

  Seemingly trivial details may be important, and it may trigger other important memories
• reinstate context

  The witness should return to the original crime scene in their mind, and imagine the environment, like the weather and what they could see, and their emotions, such as whether they were happy or bored

  this is linked to context dependent forgetting
• reverse the order

  Events should be recalled in a different order from the original sequence

  This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must’ve happened rather than reporting the actual events

  It also prevents dishonesty as it is harder for people to produce an untruthful account if they have to reverse it
• change perspective

  Witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s perspective

  This is done to disrupt the effect of expectations, and also the effect of schema on recal

  The schema you have for a particular setting generate expectations of what would have happened and it is the schema that is recalled rather than what actually happened
• A strength of the cognitive interview is evidence it works

  Meta-analysis combine data from 55 studies comparing the CI with the standard police interview, the CI gave an average 41% increase in accurate information compared with a standard interview

  however, there was also an increase in inaccurate information recalled by participants. Cognitive interviews may sacrifice quality of eyewitness testimonies in favor of the quantity of details.
• A limitation of the CI is that not all of it elements are equally effective or useful

  Psychologists found each technique used alone produced more information than the standard police interview

  A combination of report everything and reinstate context produced the best recall

  this confirmed suspicions that some aspects of CI are more useful than others, and casts some doubt on the credibility of the cognitive interview as a whole
• A limitation is that the CI is time consuming

  It takes more time and training than the standard police interview and many forces do not have the resources to provide more than a few hours training.

  More training also requires more money

  This suggests that the complete CI as it exists is not a realistic method for police officers to use, and it may be better to focus on a few key elements