The Cognitive Interview

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The Cognitive Interview

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The cognitive interview involves a number of techniques:

1 - Context Reinstatement

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.

2 - Recall from a Changed Perspective

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

3 - Recall in Reverse Order

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

4 - Report Everything

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

The enhanced cognitive interview consists of these main additional features:

Encourage the witness to relax and speak slowly.

Offer comments to help clarify witness statements.

Adapt questions to suit the understanding of individual witnesses.

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One limitation of 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.

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.

A final criticism is that police personnel have to be trained and this can be expensive and time consuming.

Geiselman (1985) set out to investigate the effectiveness of the cognitive interview. Participants viewed a film of a violent crime and, after 48 hours, were interviewed by a policeman using one of three methods: 1 - the cognitive interview, 2 - a standard interview used by the Los Angeles Police; or 3 - an interview using hypnosis. The number of facts accurately recalled and the number of errors made were recorded. The average number of correctly recalled fa ts for the cognitive interview was 41.2, for hypnosis it was 38.0 and for the standard interview it was 29.4.