cognitive interview

Cards (10)

  • 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