The nonspecific preparation that follows a warning stimulus (WS) to speed responding to an impending imperative stimulus (IS) is generally viewed as a strategic, intentional process. An alternative view holds that WS acts as a conditioned stimulus that unintentionally elicits a tendency to respond at the moment of IS presentation as a result of a process of trace conditioning. These views were contrasted as explanatory frameworks for classical effects on reaction time of the duration and intertrial variability of the foreperiod, the interval between WS and IS. It is shown that the conditioning view accounts for the available data at least as well as the strategic view. In addition, the results of 3 experiments provide support for the conditioning view by showing that unintentional contributions to nonspecific preparation can be dissociated from intentional contributions.

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Recent results of forgery detection by implementing biometric signature verification methods are promising. At present, forensic signature verification in daily casework is performed through visual examination by trained forensic handwriting experts, without reliance on computerassisted methods. With this competition on on-and offline skilled forgery detection, our objective is to make a first step towards bridging the gap between automated biometric performances and expert-based visual comparisons. We intent to combine realistic forensic casework with automated methods by testing systems on a forensic-like new dataset. The results achieved by the participating systems are promising: 2.85% Equal Error Rate (EER) on the online data and 9.15% on the offline data. From these results we indicate that automated methods might be able to support forensic handwriting experts (FHEs) to formulate the strength of evidence that needs to be reported in court in the future.

This competition scenario aims at a performance comparison of several automated systems for the task of signature verification. The systems have to rate the probability of authorship and non-authorship of signatures. In particular they have to determine whether questioned signatures are simulated disguised or the normal signature of the reference writer. Furthermore, the results will be compared to forensic handwriting examiners (FHEs) opinions on the same tasks. As such, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this scenario will be the first attempt in literature to relate system performances to the performance of FHEs who gave their opinion on exactly the the same signatures.

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