CGSC 270-010

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In the April 19, 1997 issue of Science News, Bruce Bower examines the issue of what is known as a cognitive interview. This type of interview, designed by Ronald Fisher and Edward Geiselaman, is structured to help boost the levels and amounts of recall for eyewitnesses to crimes or other events. The cognitive interview is comprised of rapport building and memory enhancing strategies. Four main memory joggers are used: 1) Think about the physical surroundings and personal emotional reactions existing at the time of the critical past event. 2) Report everything that comes to mind about the events, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, 3) Recount events in chronological sequence, and 4) Have differing perspectives while performing recall, taking the perpetrator's point of view for example. Other strategies may attempt to help memory of physical attributes or speech mannerisms.

This type of interview was investigated in groups of college students and police officers, and found to increase recall up to 35%. Errors did not increase with larger recall amounts either. However, crime victims and witnesses tend to experience more anxiety and drops in communication skill during interviews. This observation led to the "enhanced" cognitive interview. This type of interview is begun by building rapport and encouraging interviewees to take active roles in recall. The interviewee starts, and then the interviewer comes in with probing questions. This interview type was found to increase recall by as much as 50% over the original version. Overall, the cognitive interview offers the most benefits in its early stages when information comes directly from the witness.

Despite some very positive results and improvements over other interview types, there is conflict over the cognitive interview issue. It is believed that inappropriately trained interviewers can inspire recall errors, and the cognitive interview needs to be tested in more real life situations, rather than experimental paradigms. It has been shown in some studies that the advantages of the cognitive interview seem to disappear when interviews consisting of rapport building and open communication are used without specific memory retrieval techniques. An interviewer who can relate with the witness may be all that is needed. Another finding is that the cognitive interview may work best on first encounter, but not in further attempts at memory recovery. Also, many witnesses may use subtle interviewer suggestions to create flights of imagination, or "false memories."

The cognitive interview relates to cognitive science in that the processing in memory involves internal representation. The interview seeks to help extract and expound upon the internal representations of the witnesses. These inner mental representations also undergo transformations involved with memory stores, and they must be turned into action representations for eyewitness interviews to succeed. Another aspect of this discussion is that stimuli, even briefly presented ones such as the witnessing of a crime, can involve multiple representations. Mental operations involve stages such as encoding and retrieval, and extracting information from the result of these processes by the cognitive interview can depend on how well an interviewer draws representations from the witness. Mental abilities and representations can also change with experience, which of course includes the course of time. It has also been shown that memory performance can increase with mere repetition, a notion that does not seem to hold in many studies of the cognitive interview.

One of the notions involved with sensory memory is that humans tend to see more than they have the capacity to remember. Obviously, the cognitive interview seeks to solve this shortcoming. Sensory memory traces tend to store sensory types of representation and decay swiftly. One aspect of memory is rehearsal, which helps to move representations from short- to long-term memory. Depending of the depth of processing level, a memory can be retained or forgotten. Long-term memory can be consciously or unconsciously accessible. The cognitive interview works to access both types of information. Issues such as possible perceptual priming and retention also come into play. If memories are in some way primed, retrieval may be easier. This relates to the cognitive science issue in that an interviewer may be able to implant notions within the witness that cause recall of information. However, this information may not always be reliable. Finally, the simple amount of retention that a witness is capable of may or may not aid the recall process involved with either version of the cognitive interview.

Thus, the cognitive interview is an intriguing procedure to increase eyewitness recall that raises conflicts over its possible results. It has many links to cognitive scientific theory involved with representation and memory, and can be evaluated along some of those lines.