Essay Questions
1. What is a cognitive interview and how well does it work in a forensic setting?
Key Points:
- Understanding that interviews are one of the most common ways of gathering information.
- The various people who might be interviewed.
- Aims of the interview.
- The cognitive interview: its defining characteristics and uses, including McCauley and Geiselman’s (1994) four techniques to enhance memory retrieval:
- Context reinstatement
- Report everything
- Reverse order
- Change perspective.
- Refer to research evaluating the effectiveness of the cognitive interview (e.g. Milne and Bull, 1999)
