AO1

• The cognitive interview was proposed by Geisman, who was influenced by Fisher et al's research into police interviews where they found that police were asking short, closed questions which were not asked in the order that the events took place.
• Geisman's cognitive interview was structured based on 4 key principles:

  • Context reinstatement
  • Report everything
  • Recall from changed perspective
  • Recall in reverse order
• Context reinstatement acts as a trigger that allows people to recall the events that took place and links context and state-dependent forgetting.
• Geiselman tested their concept of the cognitive interview and how effective it was by asking 89 students to watch a video of a simulated crime and interviewed them about it 2 days later. Students were either interviewed with standard police interview, or with the cognitive interview. They found that those interviewed with the cognitive interview had significantly better recall than those tested using the standard police interview.