Cognitive Interview

Question 1

What is a cognitive interview?

Answer 1

A police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crime that attempts to increase the accessibility of stored info by using multipule retrieval strategies.
Improves the accuracy of EWT by avoiding the use of leading questions.

Question 2

How does cognitive interview differ from standard interview?

Answer 2

• Avoids asking too many questions.

- Avoids asking leading questions.

Question 3

What are the 4 components of cognitive interview?

Answer 3

• Changing Perspective
• Reinstating context
• Changing Order
• Reporting every Detail

Question 4

What is Reinstating context?

Answer 4

• Interviewer encourages the interviewee to both physically and psychologically recreate the environment of the original event.
• Aim is to make memories accessible.
• People need appropriate context and emotional cues to retrieve memories.

Question 5

What is Reporting every detail?

Answer 5

• Interviewer encourages interviewee to report every detail from the event.
• Memories are interconnected with each other, so the recollection of one item may cue a whole lot of other memories.
• Small details may eventually piece together from many other witnesses to create a clearer picture of the event.

Question 6

What is changing order?

Answer 6

• Interviewer may try alternative ways through the timeline of the event.
• For example, reversing the order in which the events occur.
• Our recollections are influence by out schemas.

Question 7

What is changing perspective?

Answer 7

• Witness is asked to recall event from other peoples perspective (e.g. imagining how it would appear to other witnesses at the time).
• Done to disrupt the effect schemas have on recall.
• Approach suggested by research from Anderson and Pichert.

Question 8

What does research into the effectiveness of cognitive interview suggest?

Answer 8

• Meta - analysis of 53 studies found on average an increase of 34% in the amount of correct info generated using the CI technique compared to standard interviewing techniques. (Köhnken et al).

Question 9

What are the problems with using CI in practice?

Answer 9

• Kebbell et al interviews with police.
• Police officers suggest that this technique often requires more time than is available and that instead they prefer to use deliberate strategies.
• In addition, CI requires special training and many forces have not been able to provide more than a few hours.
• For these reasons the use of CI has not been widespread.