THE COGNITIVE INTERVIEW FOR SUSPECTS (CIS)

The investigative interview protocol known as the cognitive interview (CI) was modified for use with suspects to maximize the opportunity to detect deception. The CI for suspects (CIS) seeks to generate a large amount of information from a suspect while reserving any challenge to the subject’s story until late in the interview. The CIS also contains two techniques for requesting information from the subject in an unexpected manner: making a drawing/sketch and re-telling the story in reverse chronological order. Trained interviewers conducted the CIS with participants who were instructed to describe a recent autobiographical event or a completely fabricated event. The interviewers rated the likelihood of the participant’s truthfulness at each of six stages of the CIS protocol. The results showed that the interviewers were only slightly better than chance at assessing deception following the narrative stage, but increased accuracy systematically throughout the remainder of the CIS. This study provides an initial demonstration of the potential of the CIS for assessing the likelihood of deception during investigative interviews. Information is the lifeblood of investigations and it is the ability of investigators to obtain useful and accurate information from witnesses that is most crucial. Yet full and accurate memory recall is difficult to achieve. The Cognitive Interview (CI) technique (1, 2) is a systematic approach to interviewing witnesses toward increasing the amount of relevant information obtained without compromising the rate of accuracy (3). The CI is based on scientifically derived principles of memory and communication theory as well as extensive analyses of law-enforcement interviews. The CI has been found in scientific studies to produce significantly more information than standard question and answer type interviews. The CI as an information-gathering technique has been tested in approximately 100 laboratory tests, most of which were conducted in the United States, England, Germany or Australia. In these studies, volunteer witnesses (usually college students) observed either a live, innocuous event or a videotape of a simulated crime. Shortly thereafter (ranging from a few hours to several days), the witnesses were interviewed by a trained researcher—or in some cases by experienced police officers—who conducted either a CI or a control interview. The control interview was modeled after a typical police interview or after a generally accepted interview protocol such as the UK Memorandum of Good Practice. Across these studies, the CI typically elicited between 25%-40% more correct statements than did the control interview. The effect was extremely reliable: Of the 55 experiments examined in a meta-analysis conducted in 1999 (4), 53 experiments found that the CI elicited more information than did the comparison interview (median increase = 34%). Equally important, accuracy was just as high in the CI interviews as in the comparison interviews. A second meta-analysis with a larger sample of studies produced similar results in 2010 (5). The CI has been taught and adopted by several policing agencies and allied investigative agencies