Investigations of print discrimination
John Richard Vokey, Jason M. Tangen · 2010
We report a series of experiments on the identification of fingerprints by naive participants, using both laboratory-generated patent prints, and real, crime-scene latent prints. Using both conventional (hit, misidentification, and false-positive rates) and signal detection measures of performance, we show that naive participants perform at levels well beyond chance in these tasks. The influences of fingertype, intra- and inter-print similarity, and print area on performance are reported, as is the extension of these techniques to the identification of shoe-print patents.