cognitive interview

• The cognitive interview was designed by Fisher and Geiselman in 1992. It was designed on the basis that EWT could be improved if police used better techniques
• The cognitive interview has 4 main techniques (COPE):

  • reinstate the Context
  • change the Order
  • change the Perspective
  • report Everything
• Reinstate the Context:

  The witness should return to the original crime scene in their mind and imagine the environment and their emotions. This is related to context dependent forgetting
• Change the Order:

  Events should be recalled in a different chronological order e.g backwards. This prevents expectations of how the event should have happened or dishonesty
• Change the Perspective:

  Witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s perspectives e.g another witness. This is done to prevent expectations and schema
• Report Everything:

  Include every single detail of the event
• the cognitive interview is very time consuming. Police may be reluctant to use the CI because it takes much more time than the standard police interview
• the cognitive interview also requires special training but many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours
• Kohnken conducted a meta analysis from 53 studies and found the cognitive interview provided more correct information than the standard police interview
• Milne and Bull (2002) found each technique used individually produced more information than the standard police interview. They found that using a combination of report everything and context reinstatement produced better recall