Abstract
Holistic processing is often characterized as a process by which objects are perceived as a whole rather than a compilation of individual features. This mechanism may play an important role in the development of perceptual expertise because it allows for rapid integration across image regions. The present work explores whether holistic processing is present in latent fingerprint examiners, who compare fingerprints collected from crime scenes against a set of standards taken from a suspect. We adapted a composite task widely used in the face recognition and perceptual expertise literatures, in which participants were asked to match only a particular half of a fingerprint with a previous image while ignoring the other half. We tested both experts and novices, using both upright and inverted fingerprints. For upright fingerprints, we found weak evidence for holistic processing, but with no differences between experts and novices with respect to holistic processing. For inverted fingerprints, we found stronger evidence of holistic processing, with weak evidence for differences between experts and novices. These relatively weak holistic processing effects contrast with robust evidence for holistic processing with faces and with objects in other domains of perceptual expertise. The data constrain models of holistic processing by demonstrating that latent fingerprint experts and novices may not substantively differ in terms of the amount of holistic processing and that inverted stimuli actually produced more evidence for holistic processing than upright stimuli. Important differences between the present fingerprint stimuli and those in the literature include the lack of verbal labels for experts and the absence of strong vertical asymmetries, both of which might contribute to stronger holistic processing signatures in other stimulus domains.
Highlights
Fingerprints as evidence are an effective means to associate an individual to a crime scene, in part because fingerprint impressions are readily available from many surfaces
The goal of the present study is to address whether holistic processing might be one mechanism underlying the development of expertise in fingerprint examiners
In Experiment 2, we measured holistic processing for inverted fingerprints to test if inversion could affect holistic processing and found that the interaction between congruency, alignment, and expertise was stronger than what was observed with upright fingerprints
Summary
Fingerprints as evidence are an effective means to associate an individual to a crime scene, in part because fingerprint impressions are readily available from many surfaces. The concept of a “match” in forensic identifications implies a form of similarity judgment, where the amount of detail must be in sufficient agreement and provide sufficient specificity for the examiner to conclude identification. This is further complicated by the fact that an examiner rarely has an opportunity to examine the impressions of all other individuals who may have had contact with a surface, which requires them to focus on features that might be most rare (Busey, Nikolov, Yu, Emerick, & Vanderkolk, 2016)
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