The Cognitive Interview

Question 1

What is the cognitive interview (CI)?

Answer 1

• Developed by Geiselman et el (1984), CI is based on proven psychological principles concerning effective memory recall.
• This is a police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crime, that encourages them recreate the original context of the crime to increase accessibility of stored info. As our memory is made of a network of associations, memories are accessed using multiple retrieval strategies

Question 2

What is standard police interview (SPI)?

Answer 2

• Fisher and Geiselman (1992) identified what is wrong with the techniques usually used by police in interviews.
• SPI revolves around the interviewer rather than the witness as they do most of the talking, often asking close-ended questions, which discourages extra information from being added. Interview may unconsciously ask leading questions to confirm their beliefs about the crime.
• These practices tend to increase inaccurate info collected in the interview, as it encourages withholding info, abbreviated and unsure answers, SPI disrupts the natural process of searching through memory, making memory retrieval inefficient.

Question 3

Describe mental reinstatement of original context (1)

Answer 3

• Interviewer encourages interviewee to mentally recreate the physical and psychological environment of the original incident.
• e.g. what was the weather like, how did you feel at the time.
• The aim is to make memories accessible through appropriate contextual and emotional cues to retrieve memories.

Question 4

Describe report everything (2)

Answer 4

• Interviewer encourages the reporting of every detail without editing anything out even if it may seem irrelevant.
• e.g. please do not leave anything out. I am interested in absolutely everything that you remember.
• Memories are interconnected so the recollection of one item may cue other memories. In addition, small details may be pieced together from different witnesses to form a clear picture of the event

Question 5

Describe change order (3)

Answer 5

• Interviewer may alternate the timeline of the incident e.g. reversing the order of events.
• The rationale behind this is recollection may be influenced by schemas (general expectations). So recalling the event from end to start may prevent pre-existing schemas from influencing

Question 6

Describe change perspective (4)

Answer 6

• The interviewee is asked to recall the event from multiple perspectives e.g. imagining how it would’ve seemed from another witness. This is suggested by the research done by Anderson and Pichert.
• This is done to disrupt the effect that schemas have on recall.

Question 7

What is a strength of cognitive interview?

Answer 7

• The amount of supporting research. A meta-analysis of 53 studies found an increase of 34% in the amount of correct information generated in the CI compared to SPI techniques, done by Kohnken et al (1999). Although most of the studies involved volunteers, usually students, tested in a laboratory, may not reflect real-world practices However, effectiveness of CI may be due to some individual elements. Milne and Bull (2002) found when participants were interviewed with a combination of the ‘report everything’ and ‘mental reinstatement’ components of CI, recall was higher than when just using one individual component or the control condition (being told to ‘try again’). Suggests that overall CI is effective for increasing accessibility of stored information

Question 8

What are weaknesses of cognitive interview?

Answer 8

• Its effectiveness has been in terms of quantity of information, not quality. The procedure enhances the quantity of correct without compromising the quality of that information. Kohnken et al (1999) found an 81% increase of correct information but also a 61% increase of incorrect information when enhanced CI was compared to standard interview. This means all info collected from CIs must be treated with caution as it doesn’t guarantee accuracy.