Isolating the effects of the cognitive interview techniques

Abstract

The cognitive interview (CI) is a procedure designed for use in police interviews involving witnesses. This study tested the most recent version of the CI (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992) which comprises not only 'cognitive' techniques such as context reinstatement but also ' social ' techniques for increasing rapport. Children (aged eight-nine years) viewed a magic show and were interviewed after a short delay of two days (time 1) and/or a longer delay of 12 days (time 2). At time 1 the CI produced a significantly greater amount of correct recall than did a structured interview (SI) which was similar to the CI save for the CI's special cognitive techniques. However, at time 1 the CI also produced significantly more recall errors. At time 2, no differences occurred between CI and SI recall. There was a significant hypermnesia effect at time 2 for those groups interviewed twice suggesting an effect of retrieval practice. The time 1 effects of the CI were found to exist only in the questioning phase of the interview and social and cognitive explanations for the changes in the nature of recall with a CI are considered. Practical implications are discussed in the context of good practice for interviewing child witnesses.

The Cognitive Interview for Eyewitnesses with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Furthermore, coding (which was in-line with previous research, e.g. Memon et al, 1997) did not distinguish between major errors (e.g. the sex of the perpetrator) and minor errors (e.g.…”

“…All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and scored against the original transcript of the video clip using a technique developed by Memon et al (1997) …”

“…The Cognitive Interview (CI) is now one of the most widely used and accepted forms of interviewing in both the US and the UK (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992;Geiselman, 1984), and is currently taught to all police recruits in the UK (Dando & Milne, 2009). The CI has been shown to elicit detailed, yet accurate, reports from adult witnesses (Davis, McMahon & Greenwood, 2005;Kohnken, Milne, Memon & Bull, 1999), children (Geiselman & Padilla, 1988;Memon, Wark, Bull & Koehnken, 1997), older witnesses (Wright & Holliday, 2007b) and witnesses with learning disabilities (referred to in the US as mental retardation) (Milne, Clare & Bull, 1999 The Cognitive Interview (CI) is based on two basic principles of how memory typically operates; that retrieval of an event will be enhanced if the context experienced at recall matches that experienced during encoding (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992;Roediger, Weldon, Challis, & Craik, 1989; Tulving & Thompson, 1973), and that memories are stored as interconnected nodes that provide multiple retrieval routes (Tulving, 1974). On the basis of these principles the CI was the external (physical) and internal (subjective) states that they experienced during the witnessed event before freely reporting as many details of the event as possible.…”

Making the most of information‐gathering interviews with children

“…However, the CI encourages more extensive retrieval by instructing interviewees to recall events in a variety of sequences-from the end, from the middle, or from the most memorable event. This technique has the same effect as simply asking the interviewee to make a second retrieval attempt (Memon, Wark, Bull, & Kö hnken, 1997). In other words, by going through the event a second time, the interviewee may provide some new information not reported earlier.…”

Efficient coding of eyewitness narratives: A comparison of syntactic unit and word count procedures

“…Although a larger sample size might have detected more discrepancies between SU and word count procedures, our sample sizes were typical for eyewitness research involving children (e.g., Goodman, Hirschman, Hepps, & Rudy, 1991;Memon, Wark, Bull, & Koehnken, 1997). Unfortunately, the data set we reanalyzed did not include narratives from an adult sample, and therefore further research is necessary to ensure that comparisons between adults and children are not influenced by the choice of coding system.…”