The enhanced cognitive interview: Expressions of uncertainty, motivation and its relation with report accuracy

[Excerpt] This chapter briefly overviews some early/foundational research on the Cognitive Interview (CI) involving the first author – RB. It then describes our very recent research conducted in Portugal. Crucially, it also mentions some real-world impacts of the cognitive interview. Even though, with several colleagues, in the 1990s the first author of the current chapter (i.e., RB) published a number of studies on the Cognitive Interview, he has repeatedly failed to recall when he first met Ronald P. Fisher many years ago. However, RB does remember a few things about when he first met Ron’s CI co-originator – Ed Geiselman. This was at a conference in the USA. Being then ‘early career’ and taking his mentor’s advice, RB sat at the back so as not to disturb the presenters by his reading of journal articles if their presentation happened to be boring. Ed began to present and after a while said ‘the CI improved recall by around 40%’. RB had never heard of anything in the whole of psychology that had been associated with a 40 per cent improvement! So he listened to the rest of this ‘early/decades ago’ presentation and then read the few publications available at that time on the CI – all, of course, written by Ron and Ed. As with almost all research, their studies/experiments were not perfect, and so with others in England RB successfully applied for funding to conduct in the early/mid 1990s several better experiments expecting to find the claimed very large CI effect to be spurious. (For more on this see later in this chapter.) [...]
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