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The prevalence effect in fingerprint identification: Match and non‐match base‐rates impact misses and false alarms
Author(s) -
Growns Bethany,
Kukucka Jeff
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.3800
Subject(s) - fingerprint (computing) , psychology , matching (statistics) , identification (biology) , task (project management) , audiology , statistics , computer security , computer science , medicine , mathematics , botany , management , economics , biology
The prevalence effect is a phenomenon whereby target prevalence impacts performance in visual search (e.g., baggage screening) and visual comparison (e.g., face‐matching) tasks – people more often 'miss' infrequent target stimuli. The current study investigated prevalence effects in fingerprint identification – an important visual comparison task used in criminal investigations. Participants ( N = 287) judged 100 fingerprint pairs where the prevalence of match trials was either 10% (low), 50% (equal), or 90% (high), and half received trial‐level feedback on their performance. As predicted, low match prevalence increased errors on match trials (i.e., misses), whereas high match prevalence errors on non‐match trials (i.e., false alarms) – but only when participants received feedback. These effects were largely driven by changes in bias (C), rather than sensitivity (d’). These results suggest that the combination of feedback and match prevalence can impact the types of errors that fingerprint examiners may make in practice.