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Memory-Enhancing Techniques for Investigative Interviewing: The Cognitive Interview

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This book brings the cognitive interview into focus for investigators and composite artists. Understanding the simple techniques of listening and assisting the witness in the exercise of recollection, will enhance the sketch artists' interview.

As every investigator knows, well articulated eyewitness statements are essential to any good case. The CI is the most effective and proven non-hypnotic victim/witness interview that I am aware of. This book presents the principles of effective interviewing in a very clear and easy to understand manner. It is not loaded with useless theory, but rather very practical techniques to use as well as those to avoid.

This book is the classic reference for applying principles of cognitive psychology to investigative interviewing. It focuses on helping witnesses remember accurately, given how our minds and memories naturally work. It deals less with issues of detecting deception and motivating uncooperative witnesses to tell the truth.

The book's thirteen chapters outline the requirements of investigative interviewing and the basics of human cognition as they build toward the author's model of successful cognitive interviewing. Initial chapters discuss the problems inherent in eyewitness accounts of crimes and the need to structure interviews to obtain accurate information from even the most cooperative witness. Readers learn the basic dynamics of an interview, how to choose the best setting and how to ask effective questions and overcome barriers that stand in the way of good answers.

Later chapters introduce principles of human cognition and apply them to the demands of interviewing. Lessons learned include techniques for recreating the context of a witnessed event, strategies for probing to get additional detail, and sequencing from open-ended to specific, detail oriented closed-ended questions. A later chapter includes annotated transcripts of two interviews which illustrate and highlight these techniques.

The capstone chapter outlines a training and practice regimen for acquiring the thirteen basic skills of cognitive interviewing. These skills are (from p. 186):

--1. Establish rapport
--2. Listen actively
--3. Tell eyewitnesses to actively generate info (don't wait passively)
--4. Ask open-ended questions
--5. Pause before asking follow-up questions
--6. Don't interrupt
--7. Explicitly request detailed descriptions
--8. Encourage eyewitnesses to concentrate intensely
--9. Encourage eyewitnesses to use imagery
-10. Recreate the original event's context
-11. Adopt the eyewitness's perspective
-12. Ask eyewitness-compatible questions
-13. Follow the Cognitive Interview sequence

This is an interesting read from the history of interviewing and cognitive psychology. Practitioners looking for a more current evolution of cognitive investigative interviewing may prefer Pauletta Otis's Educing Information: Interrogation Science and Art. Also, Fisher and Geiselman's techniques should not be confused with the "cognitive interviewing" approach to improving survey questionnaires described in Cognitive Interviewing: A Tool for Improving Questionnaire Design by Gordon Willis.