cognitive interview

• The cognitive interview was created for police interviews that include witnesses do improve the effectiveness. The technique has 4 distinct components. The first one is mental reinstatement of original context. The aim of this is to give a cue to retrieve memories which may be there, but not remembered. This can include the interviewer asking the witness to imagine their emotions, what the weather is like etc. This will recreate the physical and psychological environments from the incident.
• The second component is report everything. This encourages the witness to tell the interviewer everything they remember, even if it seen as unimportant. This unimportant item could cause a cue of another memory that is important to the case. The next component is change order. This stops schemas from filling in information due to gaps they have in their memories. Reporting the order backwards stops these schemas.
• The last component is change perspective. The interviewer may as the witness to report the events as if someone else was viewing it, for example on the other side of the road. This technique also aims to stop the schemas that have an effect on the recall.
• A big issue with the cognitive interview is that the effectiveness has been in terms of quantity of information, not quality.

  The procedure was designed to enhance the amount of correct information. There was an 81% increase of correct information from the cognitive interview, however there was also an increase of incorrect information, 61%, that was brought with the cognitive interview. This was from a comparison of it with the standard interview.

  This means that the cognitive interview does not guarantee correct information and police should be careful with the information they collect.
• Another criticism is the time that takes to implement the cognitive interview.

  Police suggest that this technique requires more time than is often available and instead they prefer to use deliberate strategies aimed to limit EWT to the amount of info that is necessary. In addition, it requires special training to implement it and officers and forcers have not been able to provide more than a few hours.

  These limitations have meant that the use of the cognitive interview has not been widespread.
• A positive is that it may be particularly useful when interviewing elderly people.

  There are negative stereotypes on the elderly with a ‘declining memory’ and can make witnesses overly cautious about reporting information. However, this may overcome such difficulties, as it stresses the importance of reporting any detail. Research compared younger and older adults’ memories of a filmed stimulated crime using either the SI or the CI. The cognitive interview produced more information overall, however the impact of the cognitive interview was bigger on older adults’ memory than the younger.
• It is hard to evaluate the effectiveness of the cognitive interview when it has been used due to the fact there are multiple techniques in one rather than just one technique.

  For example, the Thames valley police uses a version that doesn’t include the ‘change perspectives’ part. Many other police don’t use every part of the cognitive interview so is hard to compare them.

  This means that it is hard to establish the overall effectiveness of the technique, using all components.