The
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
Abstracts
Itiel E. Dror,
Ailsa Peron, Sarah Hind, & David Charlton
Twenty-seven participants made a total of 2,484 judgments
whether a pair of .fingerprints matched or not. A quarter of the trials acted
as a control condition. The rest of the trials included top-down influences
aimed at biasing the participants to find a match. These manipulations included
emotional background stories of crimes and explicitly disturbing photographs
from crime scenes, as well as subliminal messages. The data revealed that
participants were affected by the top-down manipulations and as a result were
more likely to make match judgments. However, the increased likelihood of making
match judgments was limited to ambiguous fingerprints. The top-down
manipulations were not able to contradict clear non-matching fingerprints.
Hence, such contextual information actively biases the ways gaps are filled,
but was not sufficient to override clear bottom-up information.
Dror, I.E., Peron, A., Hind, S., & Charlton, D. (2005). When emotions get the better of us: The effect of contextual top-down processing on matching fingerprints. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19(6), 799-809.
