Cognitive Interview

• The cognitive interview is a technique used by the police in order to receive details from eyewitnesses after an event. It is more complex than the standard police interview and has 4 main steps witnesses work through whilst they are encouraged to speak slowly and take their time.
• Report everything: witnesses report all details they can remember even if they seem irrelevant to the investigation in the hope details may act as cues that trigger something important.

  Reinstate the context: witnesses are encouraged to close their eyes and to try to imagine the situation they were in including the context around them and the emotional state they were in to try to act as cues and eliminate retrieval failure.
• Reverse the order: witnesses are asked to describe the event from the end and work backwards to the beginning in order to validate their original statement and to check for any errors they made or information they have added.

  Change the perspective: witnesses are asked to describe the event from a different point of view, for example from the point of view of the victim. This is also to check the accuracy of the original statement.
• Evaluation

  Kohnken did a meta analysis and found that the CI was superior to the standard police interview in the amount of correct information but also the CI generated more incorrect information than the standard police interview. There are practical issues with the CI - time consuming and police officers need to receive proper training in order to carry out. Milne and Bull found that the first two techniques improved EWT more than any of the other steps. This suggests some elements of the CI are more useful than others.