Cognitive interviewing

Cognitive interviewing is a technique used by the police to enhance the memory recall of eye-witnesses.

Reinstate the context

Recall the circumstances of the event being reviewed to enhance contextual memory retrieval by activating different contextual encoding. This could include:

• events leading up to and following the event

• time, location, weather conditions

• sensory information (sights, sounds, smells, heat/cold, etc.)

• revisiting a specific physical location in order to expose yourself to relevant environmental cues

Describe different perspectives

Recall the event from different viewpoints. This helps to identify perceptual blind-spots in your recollections that you might have filled in with assumptions. (See Perspective shifting and self-distancing)

• What would other people involved have perceived?

• What would an external observer have perceived?

• Would the event be perceived differently depending on where you stood?

Recall in various orders

Not just relying on chronological accounts means you can explore cause and effect assumptions in more detail. You could:

• tell it in reverse order

• work forwards and backwards from a key event

• capture key events on separate pieces of paper and then experiment with swapping them around

In-depth recollection

Drill down to minute detail in your recollections. This counters the tendency for our memories to be modified and increasingly abstracted every time we reconstruct them.

More information

Cognitive interviewing techniques can also be used to help people with imaginative visualisation of scenarios.