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- Title
When emotions get the better of us: the effect of contextual top-down processing on matching fingerprints.
- Authors
Dror, Itiel E.; Péron, Ailsa E.; Hind, Sara-Lynn; Charlton, David
- 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.
- Subjects
EMOTIONS; HUMAN fingerprints; INFLUENCE; JUDGMENT (Psychology); CRIME scenes; CONTEXT effects (Psychology)
- Publication
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2005, Vol 19, Issue 6, p799
- ISSN
0888-4080
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/acp.1130