Variations of the Cognitive Interview: Which one is the Most Effective in Enhancing Children’s Testimonies? FANNY VERKAMPT * and MAGALI GINET Universite ´ Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France SUMMARY Two experiments were conducted to examine the effectiveness of the combination of instructions used in the Cognitive Interview (CI) and the effectiveness of a new mnemonic, the ‘cued recall’ (CR), on children’s recall and suggestibility levels. In the first experiment, 229 children, ages 4–5 and 8–9, participated in a painting session. They were then interviewed with one of six interview protocols: A full CI, four of its variations, or a Structured Interview (SI). The children were then asked some misleading questions. All of the variations of the CI elicited more correct details than the SI, without a concomitant in errors or confabulations. Moreover, the CI with the change order instruction (CO) omitted reduced the children’s suggestibility level. In the second experiment, this variation of the CI was tested on 57 children. Results confirmed the effectiveness of this protocol. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The Cognitive Interview (CI) is an investigative interview protocol developed by Geiselman et al. (1984). Its effectiveness in enhancing witness recollection has been demonstrated not only for various groups (e.g. adults, children and people with learning disabilities) but also in many countries (for a meta-analysis, see Ko ¨ hnken, Milne, Memon, & Bull, 1999). However, while 41% of child eyewitnesses are under the age of 6 (Gray, 1993), few researchers have focused on the effectiveness of the CI with very young children (4–5 year olds). Moreover, the few studies conducted with preschoolers have found lower efficacy as compared to adults, owing to difficulties in the use of certain CI instructions. Therefore, the primary objectives of the two studies presented here were twofold. First, to compare the effectiveness of the cognitive instructions of the CI tested with five interview protocols on very young children (under the age of 5) and young children, by using a SI as a control interview (cf. Holliday, 2003b; Holliday & Albon, 2004; Larsson, Granhag, & Spjut, 2003). Second, to introduce an original instruction in the CI protocol, namely cued recall (CR), that is grounded in basic psychological theory. Based on theoretical principles concerning memory retrieval (e.g. encoding specificity principle; Tulving & Thomson, 1973), the CI is composed of four general retrieval mnemonics: (a) the context reinstatement instruction (CRI) (i.e. mental reconstruction of the external and internal context that existed during the encoding of the event), (b) the APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2009) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1631 *Correspondence to: Fanny Verkampt, Universite ´ Blaise Pascal, LAPSCO - UBP/CNRS, 34, avenue Carnot, 63 037 Clermont-Ferrand, France. E-mail: fanny.verkampt@etudiant.univ-bpclermont.fr Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.