Capturing fingerprint expertise with protocol analysis

The broad aim of this project is to turn fingerprint novices into experts more quickly by developing more rigorous training practices. To do this, we first have to understand what makes an expert so special. Expert fingerprint examiners are highly accurate in their judgements and consistently outperform novices across a variety of tasks. They can distinguish between matching and non-matching with a high degree of accuracy, even under time constraints and with reduced visual information (Thompson, Tangen & McCarthy, 2014). The current project aims to capture to essence of expert performance in forensic fingerprint examination using think-aloud protocol analyses. To do this, we will analyse and compare the concurrent and retrospective verbalisations of experts novices during their performance on a domain representative task. Using their verbalised thoughts, we will then be able to generate hypotheses for the cognitive processes and mechanisms mediating the superior performance. These hypotheses will be tested in designed experiments during subsequent phases of the project to determine whether the mechanisms are indeed responsible for the superiority of expert performance. This research as a whole will add to the advancement of fingerprint expertise, as careful analysis of task characteristics, performance, and underlying knowledge and cognitive processing is at the heart of improving current practices.