A School Boy's Evaluation of the Cognitive Interview

The cognitive interview was developed by Geiselman after research from Fisher showed that standard interview techniques generally affected the concentration and validity of the answers given by witnesses. The cognitive interview consists of four components which are: Cognitive reinstatement (recalling the scene), Report everything (reporting everything including the most trivial things), Report from a changed perspective (report the crime from someone else's perspective), and Reverse Order (reporting the events in different orders). They generally consisted of interviewing with non leading questions and were used to jog the memory of the witness and gain more information.

More research with Geiselman proved that the cognitive interview was more effective with a crime simulation. However, this may be deemed as invalid and lacks the realism of a true crime. Fisher's research counteracts this however as he looked at the use of the cognitive interview in everyday life in Miami and found in general that the cognitive interview acquired more recall than the standard interview. It was also proven popular throughout British officers as the Kebbel survey showed that most officers in Britain used the cognitive interview technique.

The issues that arose throughout the cognitive interview was in research such as Koehnken where they found that the cognitive interview made people recall more incorrect information than the standard interview. Kebbel's survey also showed that police officers had concerns with how much information was incorrectly recalled by the cognitive interview, it is also very time consuming when using the enhanced cognitive interview.

Milne and Bull did a test on each of the individual sections of the cognitive interview to test each section's effectiveness. They found that each section of the cognitive interview used separately increased recall. However, the most effective combination is using CR and RE. This generally proves that if this is the most effective combination then it would make the CP and RO seem less valid and affective and therefore not needed.

Geiselman also discovered that the cognitive interview is ineffective on children under the age of six. His research showed that children under the age of six seemed to get confused and therefore recall incorrect information. He stated that an age of eight or over would show more desirable results.

Overall the cognitive interview seems to give more recall, but the issue with incorrect recall and lack of effectiveness on children means that we can't completely generalise the effectiveness of the cognitive interview.