Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, including the use of the cognitive interview.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to describe the cognitive interview, its four techniques and the enhanced version, with evaluation. The exam skill is to explain why each technique works (linking to memory theory), to give the supporting evidence, and to weigh the gains in quantity against the costs of accuracy and time.

The four techniques

The cognitive interview was designed by Fisher and Geiselman using principles from the psychology of memory, and each technique has a theoretical rationale. Report everything is based on the idea that recalling even trivial details may trigger other memories and that incomplete-seeming details may be useful when pieced together with other witnesses. Reinstate the context applies the encoding specificity principle (the basis of context-dependent forgetting): mentally returning to the environment and emotional state of the crime provides cues that aid retrieval. Reverse the order requires the witness to recall events in a different sequence (for example, from the end backwards), which prevents reliance on expectations or schemas about how events "should" have unfolded and so reduces dishonesty and reconstruction. Change perspective asks the witness to recall the scene from another person's viewpoint, again disrupting the influence of schemas. The last two techniques work by forcing genuine retrieval rather than schema-driven reconstruction.

The enhanced cognitive interview (ECI) adds elements such as building rapport, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly, and asking open-ended questions.

The enhanced version recognises that recall is also a social process, so it focuses on the dynamics of the interview itself: the interviewer builds rapport to reduce the witness's anxiety, minimises distractions, encourages the witness to speak slowly, and uses open-ended rather than leading questions. Evaluating the cognitive interview requires balancing its benefits against its costs. The clearest benefit is the increase in the quantity of correct information, with Kohnken's meta-analysis showing an average 41% gain over standard interviews. However, the same research found the cognitive interview also increased the amount of incorrect information recalled, so it improves quantity more reliably than accuracy. There are also practical limitations: the full procedure is time-consuming, requires specialist training that not all forces can provide, and in practice police often use only some of the techniques, so it is more accurate to say specific elements (especially context reinstatement) are useful than to claim the whole package is uniformly effective.