Cognitive Interviews - Psychology Unit 1

What is the cognitive interview?

Fisher and Geiselman (1991) reviewed the relevant psychological literature on memory, and related this to the way that interviews were carried out by the Police in real life.

They found that people remembered events better when they are provided with retrieval cues. This could be accomplished in the Police interviews by mentally reinstating the context of the event being recalled. Fisher and Geiselman developed an interview technique, the cognitive interview, which was based on proven psychological principles concerning effective memory recall.

There are four distinctive components which are in the original cognitive interview;

1. Report EVERYTHING: The interviewer must encourage the reporting of every single detail of the event, even though…