eyewitness testimony :The cognitive interview

Question 1

explain what is meant by the cognitive interview

Answer 1

The cognitive interview is a police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crimes which encourages them to recreate the original context in order to increase the accessibility of stored information

Question 2

ao1:context reinstatement

Answer 2

Trying to mentally recreate an image of the situation, including details of the environment, such as the weather conditions, and the individual’s emotional state including their feelings at the time of the incident.

Question 3

ao1:recall from a changed perspective

Answer 3

Trying to mentally recreate the situation from different points of view e.g. describing what another witness present at the scene would have seen.

Question 4

a01:recall in reverse order

Answer 4

The witness is asked to describe the scene in a different chronological order e.g. from the end to the beginning.

Question 5

a01:report everything

Answer 5

The interviewer encourages the witness to report all details about the event, even though these details may seem unimportant

Question 6

a01:the enhanced cognitive interview

Answer 6

The main additional features are:
• Encourage the witness to relax and speak slowly.
• Offer comments to help clarify witness statements.
• Adapt questions to suit the understanding of individual
witnesses

Question 7

a03:evaluation

Answer 7

One limitation is the cognitive interview is that it’s time consuming to conduct and takes much longer than a standard police interview. It is also time consuming to train police officers to use this method. This means that it is unlikely that the ‘proper’ version of the cognitive interview is used.

Question 8

a03:evaluation

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

a03:evaluation

Answer 9

another strength is the support for effectiveness of the enhanced CI ,a meta analysis by kohnken et al (1999) combined data from 50 studies.The enhanced CI consistently provided more correct information than the standard interview used by police,shows there are real practical benefits to the police of using the enhanced version of CI