Fact Finding on the Psychology of Fingerprint Comparison

[Boyd Baumgartner]

I'm trying to hunt down as much literature as I can get on the Psychology of Fingerprint Comparisons. My ultimate goal is to overlay some fundamentals of Similarity Heuristic onto the process of fingerprint comparison and fill in the similarities. I am only in the very initial fact finding stages and have yet to determine the feasibility.

I'm working from very little knowlege here on the existence of such topics outside of Busey and Vanderkolk, which focuses more on the biological aspects of psychology than I want to touch on. So, if you know of any articles/studies/etc, please forward them to boyd.baumgartner@metrokc.gov

Thanks!

[John Vanderkolk]

When I recruited Dr. Busey at Indiana University http://www.indiana.edu/~psych/faculty/busey.html in 2002, he asked what I wanted to accomplish. I emphasized Judge Pollak's decision, before he changed his mind and reversed himself, of not letting an expert render an opinion and letting the jury decide whether two fingerprints matched. I wanted Dr. Busey to study experts and novices and decisions being made by them. I wanted Dr. Busey to help explain how experts become experts and the differences from novices. I wanted the decision making process explained. He asked how interested I was in this and I told him I would collaborate with him for the duration, whatever that would be, I could keep him busy for years to come. I have introduced Dr. Busey not only to fingerprints, but also firearms and toolmarks at the AFTE seminar, and document examinations at the ABFDE Daubert seminars www.abfde.org about two years ago and again Nov 9 and 10. Dr. Busey is interested in vision science and pattern recognition. I asked him in 2002, about studying the decision making process, and he said let's start at the beginning, the initial stages of perception. We will get to intervening stages and the decision making process later. After a few meetings, phone calls and emails, Dr. Busey had a plan. We would start studying the initial phases of perception and move forward.

Particularly, Dr. Busey writes and speaks of configural processing. Study configural processing in your initial studies. I am excited about your interests, maybe you can recruit a research professor near you and study together. Research professors are interested in real world applications of their research.

At our recent research studies last May, 2006 Dr Busey had three IU research professor colleagues participating with us in eye tracking studies, fMRI brain scans, and EEG recordings and forced choice behavior studies of a variety of images. Our research is growing and moving forward. I plan on keeping him, and now them, busy for years to come.

Enjoy your research. John V.