Perceptual, cognitive, and psychological elements involved in expert identification

Dror, Itiel E. (2006) Perceptual, cognitive, and psychological elements involved in expert identification. In, McRoberts, Alan (ed.) Friction Ridge Sourcebook. (In Press)

Abstract

In expert domains, as well as in every day life, humans process information. Information is perceived, encoded, represented, transformed, stored, retrieved, compared to other information, and evaluated, to name just a few processes. However, the human mind is not a camera and we do not passively process information.
We engage in a variety of active processes that organize and impose structure on the information as it comes in from the external world. Information is then further interpreted and processed in ways that highly depend on the human mind and cognition, and less on the environment and the actual content of the information itself. As we dynamically process information, we effect what we see, how we interpret and evaluate it, and our decision making processes. Thus, to understand expert performance, and especially in a highly specialized domain such as human identification, one needs to examine the roles of the human mind and cognition.

Human cognition has been highly neglected by the fingerprint community, both by the forensic experts themselves as well as by those who design and develop related technology. This paper is a step towards addressing this oversight; fingerprint identification will be presented within its appropriate context, that of human cognition. I will first introduce the reader to cognitive psychology, explaining human information processing and illustrating psychological phenomena. Elements of the architecture of the human mind and how it operates will be briefly explained, as well as the vulnerabilities they entail.
The process of fingerprint analysis will then be examined, demonstrating the critical role of psychology in this process. I will show the theoretical as well as the practical implications of psychology to the work of fingerprint experts. The reader will see that the mind and the way humans process information is highly relevant to the working of forensic experts.

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