Cognitive Interview

Cognitive Interview

1. 1. Report Everything

   • Told to report everything no matter how small the detail is and how confident they are with it
   • Trivial memories may be important or trigger a cue to remember other important things

2. 2. Reinstate Context

   • Witness should return to original crime scene (in their mind) and imagine the environment and their emotions
     • Weather, what they can see etc
   • Relates to context-dependent forgetting

3. 3. Reverse the order

   • Recalled in a different chronological order to original sequence (end to beginning or middle to beginning)
   • Prevents dishonesty and prevents the witness telling what they expected happened not what actually did

4. 4. Change the perspective

   • Recall from someone's else (from a friend or victim or perpetrator)
   • Done to disrupt the expectations and schema on recall
   • Schema for specific place generate expectations of what would've happened and then the schema is recalled, not the event

5. Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI)

   • Fisher developed some addiional elements to CI to focus on social dynamics of interaction
   • This could include knowing when to use eye contact
   • The enhanced CI includes ideas such as reducing anxiety, minimising distractions, getting them to speak slowly and asking open-ended questions

6. Fisher and Geiselman said the police interview could be made better with more psychological techniques