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Skilled investigative interviewing is critical to ensuring that credible witness accounts are gathered in criminal investigations. The current study aimed to determine whether instructions to avoid suggestive questions and pre‐interview knowledge influence both the quality of an interviewer's questioning strategy and the interviewer's memory for the witness' account after a 1‐week delay in a laboratory study using lay student interviewers and witnesses. Results indicated that access to case details prior to the interview did not significantly influence the type or quality of questions asked within the interview itself but significantly influenced interviewers' memories for their interview 1 week later. Those who were blind to case information at the time of the interview had more accurate memories of their witness interviews than those who were correctly or incorrectly pre‐informed. Instructions to avoid suggestive questions served to reduce suggestive questions, regardless of pre‐interview knowledge. Taken together, these findings suggest that pre‐interview preparation may influence investigative outcomes beyond the interview context and traditional measures of witness accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Previous research has highlighted the potentially detrimental effects of pre‐interview preparation on witness memory within an interview context (Rivard et al., 2016). The present study examined the effect of an interviewer's pre‐interview knowledge on eyewitness memory beyond the initial interview. Method: Student witnesses were interviewed one week after viewing a mock crime event by a student interviewer who was either correctly informed, incorrectly informed, or uninformed (blind) to case details and who was either told to avoid suggestions or was not given cautionary instructions. Results: Analyses of the witnesses' recall quantity and quality one week after the interview revealed that witnesses of blind interviewers recalled more details than witnesses of incorrectly informed interviewers. Witnesses of blind interviewers were also more accurate than witnesses of incorrectly informed interviewers, but only when interviewers were warned not to ask suggestive questions. Implications: Findings suggest that interviewer training and pre‐interview knowledge may play an important role in witness recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]