cognitive interview

• Eyewitness testimony is the ability of people to remember the details of events, such as accidents and crimes, which they have witnessed. The accuracy of EWT can be affected by factors such as misleading information and anxiety.
• Cognitive interview is a method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories.
• The cognitive interview has 4 main techniques:

  1. report everything
  2. reinstate the context
  3. reverse the order
  4. change perspectives
• Report everything-

  witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant or the witness doesn't feel confident about it. seemingly trivial details may be important and may trigger other important memories.
• reinstate the context-

  The witness should return to the original crime scene 'in their mind' and imagine the environment such as what the weather was like and what they could see and their emotions such as whether they were happy or bored. This is related to context-dependent forgetting.
• Reverse the order-

  Events should be recalled in a different order from the original sequence. This is done to prevent people from reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than reporting the actual events. It also prevents dishonesty as it's harder to produce an untruthful account if they have to reverse it.
• Change perspective-

  witnesses should recall the incidents from other people's POVs. For example, how it would have appeared to other witnesses or the perpetrator. This again is done to disrupt the effect of expectations and also the effect of schema on recall. The schema you have for a particular setting (such as going into a shop) generates expectations of what would have happened and it is the schema that is recalled rather than what actually happened.
• Evaluation of cognitive interview-

  1. The CI is time-consuming, police officers may be reluctant to use it as it takes more time and requires specialist training compared to the standard police interview. For example, more time is needed to establish a rapport with a witness and allow them to relax
• Evaluation of cognitive interview-

  1. Another limitation is that some elements of the cognitive interview may be more valuable than others. For example, research has shown that using a combination of “report everything” and “context reinstatement” produced better recall than any of the conditions individually.