The cognitive interview

• The CI is a technique used by the police officer in order to receive details from eyewitnesses after an event. It is more complex than the standard police interview and it has 4 main steps witnesses work through whilst they are encouraged to speak slowly and take their time.
• 1st step- Report everything, 2nd step- Reinstate the context, encouraged to close their eyes and try to imagine the situation they were in including the context around them and their emotional state at the time to act as cues and eliminate retreival failure, 3rd step- Reverse the order of events, Change the perspective- witnesses asked to describe the event from a different point of view, eg the point of view from the victim, this is also to check the accuracy of the original statement.
• Kohnken- conducted a meta analysis and found the CI was superior to the standard police interview. Therefore the CI may be better at improving the accuracy of EWT.
• However, Kohnken also found the CI generated more incorrect info than the standard police interview. Therefore the CI may be better at getting pps to recall more details, but there is no way of distinguishing between the correct and incorrect details. The CI may therefore at times reduce the accuracy of the EWT. furthermore, the CI has practical issues as it is time consuming to carry out and not many officers have received proper training in how to use the technique so at times it may be carried out incorrectly and not lead to any improvement in EWT.