Citation

Dror IE, Péron AE, Hind SL, Charlton D. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 2005; 19(6): 799-809.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.1130

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

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. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language: en