The cognitive interview evaluation A03

• • strength of the CI research suggest that some elements of the full CI are useful
  • Milne and Bull found that each individual element of the CI was equally valuable
  • However, they also found that a combination of report everything and context reinstatement produce better recall than any other techniques individually
  • So at least these two elements should be used to improve police interviewing of witnesses even if the full CI isn’t used
• • One criticism of the CI is that the quantity of information is increased and not the quality
  • Kohnken et al found an 81% increase in the amount of correct information generated but also a 61% increase in the amount of incorrect information given in the enhanced CI
  • Suggest that the CI is only useful increasing the quantity of information that the police need to treat all information collected from the CI with caution
• • another criticism is the time taken and training required for police
  • kebbel and Wagstaff report two issues with the CI. Firstly, it requires more time than is often available and secondly it requires special training.
  • Unfortunately police often use a liberate strategies to limit and interfere to save time and many police forces have not provided necessary training to conduct the CI
  • Limitations have prevented the application of the CI to every day police interviews
• • Final criticism is a difficulty in establishing the effectiveness of the CI
  • When the CI is used in the real world, it’s not just one procedure but collection of related techniques. For example Thames Valley police use a version of the CI that doesn’t include the changing perspectives component.
  • Police force only use the reinstate context and report components
  • Therefore, it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the CI when it is used in the real world
  • This is because there is not just one procedure every police follows which we can compare
• AO1:The Cognitive Interview:

  • The first thing to say about the cognitive interview is that it has the advantage of involving the use of a variety of different retrieval strategies i.e. ways to help people retrieve their memories. In contrast the standard interview that is usually used by policemen involves asking straightforward simple questions, such as asking ‘what was she wearing’, ‘was the criminal black or white’ and so on. 
• There are four main components to the cognitive interview:

  • The first component is to report everything. This means an eyewitness should be encouraged to include every single detail. They can remember about the event even though it may seem irrelevant
  • It is important because the more things remembered the more triggers/cues there are for other memories - memories are interrelated
• • The second component is mental/context reinstatement of the original context. The police interview should help that eyewitness mentally re-create the environment from the original incident e.g. the weather, what you were feeling at the time, et cetera.
  • This is value because research is showing that context is an important queue for memory. For example, one study by Baddeley found that underwater diver who memorise wordless when they were diving later record these wordless better when they were underwater again rather than on land
• • The third component is ‘changing the order’ for example, reversing the order in which event occurred or starting in the middle when trying to recall events.
  • The value of this strategy is that our memories are affected by expectations and our schemas. We have for particular situations and these what we recall changing the order prevents the witness pre-existing what they recall.
• • The fourth component is ‘changing the perspective’. The interview is trying to access a persons memory from a different viewing point the witness for example asked to imagine how they might have appeared to other witnesses e.g. the policeman or bank cashier.
  • This is done again to disrupt the that have on recall