No 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.The need to identify people accurately is widespread and is on a sharp rise. With advances in science and technology a variety of tools are now available for identifying people. Nevertheless, fingerprints continue to be the major method used for identification in forensic and other domains (Alam, Akhteruzzaman, & Cherri, 2004). Fingerprints are quite easy to find, collect, and process; and they are also relatively non-intrusive and cost effective. With the development and increased use of computer technology in searching very large amounts of fingerprints held in databases, fingerprints are likely to continue to be the major method for biometric identification, and we can perhaps even expect its use to increase further.The strength of fingerprint identification also derives from perceived reliability. The use of fingerprints has evolved over a long period of time and for over 100 years fingerprints have been used quite successfully as a means of identification. The reliability of fingerprint evidence stems from applied scientific knowledge of the uniqueness of friction ridge skin within the fields of biology, embryology, and genetics. During all this time there has not been a single reported case of two people having identical fingerprints (even identical twins have differentiated fingerprints). Fingerprint identification seems to have withstood the test of time and proven itself as a sound and authoritative tool. Consistent with the above,