The Cognitive Interview

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• Recall an image of the setting including details such as weather, lighting, people, mood

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• Report ANY information about event that you can remember, regardless of whether you think it is relevant or not

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• Describe the event in reverse order, or start from a particular point during the event and work backwards or forwards from that point

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• Describe the event from the perspective of other people who were present at the time

1. Compared the Cognitive Interview with standard police interviewing techniques
2. Showed police training videos to a group of students
   1. Students were interviewed by law enforcement officers who had either been trained in standard police interviewing techniques or in the Cognitive Interview
      1. Recorded the number of correct items recalled, incorrect items, and confabulated items
3. FINDINGS
   1. Students correctly recalled considerably more items in Cognitive Interview than in standard interview
   2. Error rates (for both incorrect and confabulated items) were very similar for both types of interview techniques
4. This study could be criticized for its artificiality as videotapes were used. Therefore, it lacks ecological validity as videotapes do not represent real-life crime events
   1. FISHER ET AL. (1989)
      1. Trained detectives in Cognitive Interview Schedule and assessed their performance when interviewing genuine witnesses
      2. Information gain increased to 47% compared to pre-training levels

1. BEKERIAN and DENNETT (1993)
   1. Reviewed 27 studies investigating the effectiveness of the Cognitive Interview Schedule
   2. Found in all studies that the Cognitive Interview provided more accurate information than other interview procedures
2. HOLLIDAY (2003)
   1. The Cognitive Interview is also useful for interviewing children
   2. Showed a video to young children
      1. Children were interviewed about what they had seen in the video using either a standard interview or the Cognitive Interview
   3. Found that the use of the Cognitive Interview resulted in more correct details being recalled compared to the standard interview