Briefly outline and evaluate the cognitive interview.

A cognitive interview is a technique employed by police officers to conduct questionning of a witness following an event, in order to improve the memory recall of the event. There are 4 main techniques used during a cognitive interview which include; asking a witness to recall as many details as they can about the event regardless of how small they may be, recreate the scene or environment of the event such as the weather, or how the witness was feeling at the time, recall the event from a different person's perspective and recall the event in a different order.

The cognitive interview has been criticised as a technique, because it can be more time consuming for police officers, especially as the police will require specific training and expertise to employ the method correctly. The actual cognitive interview itself also takes longer than the standard method used for interviewing. Furthermore, this has been argued to decrease the accuracy in recall, by encouraging witnesses to recall the event from another persons persepective, they may produce inaccurate information.  However, the cognitive interview has been shown throughout other studies to produce more accurate information than an interview conducted in the standard manner. For example; Kohnken et al carried out a meta-analysis combining 50 studies, and this showed that the cognitive interview consistently provided more correct information than the standard interview.