Cognitive Interviewing Flashcards
7 cards from real CCP practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Cognitive Interviewing flashcards as text
Which stage of the enhanced cognitive interview is specifically designed to establish expectations and reduce witness anxiety before narrative recall begins?
Answer: Rapport and introduction phase
The ECI begins with rapport building and explaining interview goals so the witness understands their role and feels psychologically safe.
A cognitive interviewer instructs a witness: 'Try to recall the event from the moment you first noticed something unusual.' This instruction targets which memory phenomenon?
Answer: The boundary of the memory narrative to maximize early-cue retrieval
Anchoring recall to the first unusual cue establishes a clear starting boundary for the narrative, reducing schema-driven forward reconstruction.
How does the cognitive interview address the problem of witnesses providing brief, uninformative answers?
Answer: By instructing witnesses that all information is useful and encouraging elaboration through open prompts
CI explicitly trains witnesses that longer, more detailed responses are expected and valued, overcoming the tendency to give minimal answers.
In a criminal profiling context, cognitive interview data is most valuable for:
Answer: Building an accurate behavioral and descriptive picture of the offender and crime scene
Rich witness narratives obtained via CI provide profilers with detailed offender behavioral cues, geographic data, and scene reconstruction information.
When cognitive interviewing is used with child witnesses, which adaptation is most commonly recommended?
Answer: Using age-appropriate language and ground rules for 'I don't know' and 'I don't understand' responses
Children benefit from explicit permission to say 'I don't know' and age-appropriate language that avoids assumptions about their vocabulary or comprehension.
The technique of asking a witness to 'sketch the scene' during a cognitive interview is intended to:
Answer: Activate visuospatial memory traces that verbal recall alone may not access
Sketching engages spatial encoding and can trigger recall of positional relationships and layout details that verbal narrative misses.
Which comparison best captures the empirical advantage of the cognitive interview over the standard police interview in terms of information yield?
Answer: CI consistently produces 25–35% more correct information across multiple meta-analyses
Meta-analytic reviews by Köhnken and colleagues found CI produces approximately 25–35% more correct information than standard interviewing techniques.