Bethany Growns

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at University of Canterbury

Visual comparison is the ability to ‘match’ visual stimuli like fingerprints or faces and decide whether they are from the same source or different sources (e.g., fingerprint‐matching). Limited research has investigated individual differences in this ability. In this paper, we present the results of three studies that explore the generalisability a...

Perceptual expertise is typically domain-specific and rarely generalises beyond an expert’s domain of experience. Forensic feature-comparison examiners outperform the norm in domain-specific visual comparison, but emerging research suggests that they show advantages on other similar tasks outside their domain of expertise. For example, fingerprint...

People can easily extract and encode statistical information from their environment. However, research has primarily focused on conditional statistical learning (i.e., the ability to learn joint and conditional relationships between stimuli) and has largely neglected distributional statistical learning (i.e., the ability to learn the frequency and...

This paper distils seven key lessons about ‘error’ from a collaborative webinar series between practitioners at Victoria Police Forensic Services Department and academics. It aims to provide the common understanding of error necessary to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, collaboration and research. The lessons underscore the inevitability, complex...

Visual comparison – or ‘pattern‐matching’ – is a generalisable ability to compare complex visual stimuli (like fingerprints or faces) and decide whether they are from the same source or different sources (e.g., fingerprint‐matching). Visual comparison evidence can play a very influential role in court. However, little is understood about the cognit...

Background Wrongful criminal conviction can significantly impair the mental health of exonerees. However, much less is known about wrongful accusation: the impact of wrongful legal allegations or investigations—absent conviction—on mental health outcomes. Method To address this gap, we surveyed 101 victims of the Post Office Scandal in the United...

This article examines how criminal defence lawyers in the English adversarial system understand and use digital evidence (DE). Its first aim is to provide an empirical insight into their practices. Secondly, the article seeks to analyse the difficulties encountered by these professionals in accessing and working with DE-both those that they receive...

This paper presents a new test of object-matching ability: the Novel Object-Matching Test (NOM Test). Object-matching (or visual comparison) is a complex cognitive and perceptual visual comparison task undertaken by forensic scientists - yet no openly available, standardised and psychometrically validated test of object-matching ability exists. Thi...

Forensic science practitioners compare visual evidence samples (e.g. fingerprints) and decide if they originate from the same person or different people (i.e. fingerprint ‘matching’). These tasks are perceptually and cognitively complex—even practising professionals can make errors—and what limited research exists suggests that existing professiona...

Purpose Metacognitive judgements of what another person would remember had they experienced a stimulus—that is social metamemory judgements, are likely to be important in evaluations of testimony in criminal and civil justice systems. This paper develops and tests predictions about two sources of error in social metamemory judgements that have the...

Systematic reviews are indispensable tools for both reliably informing decision-makers about the state of the field and for identifying areas that need further study. Their value, however, depends on their transparency and reproducibility. Readers should be able to determine what was searched for and when, where the authors searched, and whether th...

Systematic reviews are indispensable tools for both reliably informing decision-makers about the state of the field and for identifying areas that need further study. Their value, however, depends on their transparency and reproducibility. Readers should be able to determine what was searched for and when, where the authors searched, and whether th...

The low prevalence effect is a phenomenon whereby target prevalence affects performance in visual search (e.g., baggage screening) and comparison (e.g., fingerprint examination) tasks, such that people more often fail to detect infrequent target stimuli. For example, when exposed to higher base-rates of ‘matching’ (i.e., from the same person) than...

This chapter focuses on the expertise of forensic science practitioners who make legally-relevant decisions from both a skills-based and vulnerabilities-based perspective. We bring together research relevant to forensic examiners’ decision-making to inform the development of empirically-based solutions for some of the issues we raise. We begin by d...

Jurors often have to make decisions about whether they believe a complainant's or defendant's account of an event. However, the relative ambiguity of cues in testimony creates a situation where juror evaluations can vary significantly. As a result, in cases heavily reliant on testimony there is a particular likelihood that juror characteristics wil...

Forensic feature-comparison examiners compare-or "match"-evidence samples (e.g., fingerprints) to provide judgments about the source of the evidence. Research demonstrates that examiners in select disciplines possess expertise in this task by outperforming novices-yet the psychological mechanisms underpinning this expertise are unclear. This articl...

People can easily extract and encode statistical information from their environment. However, research has primarily focused on conditional statistical learning (i.e. the ability to learn joint and conditional relationships between stimuli) and has largely neglected distributional statistical learning (i.e. the ability to learn the frequency and va...

Visual comparison—comparing visual stimuli (e.g., fingerprints) side by side and determining whether they originate from the same or different source (i.e., “match”)—is a complex discrimination task involving many cognitive and perceptual processes. Despite the real-world consequences of this task, which is often conducted by forensic scientists, l...

Automatic facial recognition technology (AFR) is increasingly used in criminal justice systems around the world, yet to date there has not been an international survey of public attitudes toward its use. In Study 1, we ran focus groups in the UK, Australia and China (countries at different stages of adopting AFR) and in Study 2 we collected data fr...

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 u...

Past research suggests that an uncritical or ‘lazy’ style of evaluating evidence may play a role in the development and maintenance of implausible beliefs. We examine this possibility by using a quasi-experimental design to compare how low- and high-quality evidence is evaluated by those who do and do not endorse implausible claims. Seven studies c...

Emerging research has demonstrated that statistical learning is a modality-specific ability governed by domain-general principles. Yet limited research has investigated different forms of statistical learning within modality. This paper explores whether there is one unified statistical learning mechanism within the visual modality, or separate task...

After a decade of critique from leading scientific bodies, forensic science research is at a crossroads. Whilst emerging research has shown that some forensic feature-comparison disciplines are not foundationally valid, others are moving towards establishing reliability and validity. Forensic examiners in fingerprint, face and handwriting compariso...

Forensic feature-comparison examiners in select disciplines are more accurate than novices when comparing visual evidence samples. This paper examines a key cognitive mechanism that may contribute to this superior visual comparison performance: the ability to learn how often stimuli occur in the environment (distributional statistical learning). We...

Forensic feature-comparison examiners in select disciplines are more accurate than novices when comparing samples of visual evidence. This article examines a key cognitive mechanism that may contribute to this superior visual comparison performance: the ability to learn how often stimuli occur in the environment (distributional statistical learning...

Forensic handwriting examiners currently testify to the origin of questioned handwriting for legal purposes. However, forensic scientists are increasingly being encouraged to assign probabilities to their observations in the form of a likelihood ratio. This study is the first to examine whether handwriting experts are able to estimate the frequency...

Both science and expert evidence law are undergoing significant changes. In this article, the authors compare these two movements – the open science movement and the evidence-based evidence movement. The open science movement is the recent discovery of many irreproducible findings in science and the subsequent move towards more transparent methods....

Forensic handwriting examiners currently testify to the origin of questioned handwriting for legal purposes. However, forensic scientists are increasingly being encouraged to assign probabilities to their observations in the form of a likelihood ratio. This study is the first to examine whether handwriting experts are able to estimate the frequency...

One of the challenges that people recently released from custody face is securing housing. Many individuals rely on supported accommodation programs for housing in the immediate post-release period. However, the value of supported accommodation programs in producing positive criminal justice and health outcomes for people released from custody has...

Human factors and their implications for forensic science have attracted increasing levels of interest across criminal justice communities in recent years. Initial interest centred on cognitive biases, but has since expanded such that knowledge from psychology and cognitive science is slowly infiltrating forensic practices more broadly. This articl...