2008 Volume 7 Issue 1 Pages 83-92
The Cognitive Interview (CI) is a memory-enhancing technique derived from the experimental literature of cognitive psychology, which was originally developed by Fisher and Geiselman. Previous experimental studies, which compared the CI with the standard interview (SI), showed that CI elicited more correct information than did SI. Two experiments investigated whether interviewee's personality characteristics affected the effectiveness of the CI. All the participants, who were separated into high and low extraverts on the basis of a personality version test, viewed a short video clip of a bank robbery. In Experiment 1, they were interviewed with the CI or SI. In Experiment 2, all the participants, who would be interviewed with the CI, engaged in the pre-interview remembering using either a guided retrieval or a simply rote retrieval. The main results indicated that the effectiveness of the CI was dependent on interviewee's personality characteristics. These results are discussed in terms of the rapport-building stage of CI.
