ORCID Profile
0000-0001-7295-8021
Current Organisations
University of Adelaide
,
University of Melbourne
Does something not look right? The information on this page has been harvested from data sources that may not be up to date. We continue to work with information providers to improve coverage and quality. To report an issue, use the Feedback Form.
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Sensory Processes, Perception and Performance | Forensic science and management | Psychology | Forensic Psychology | Decision making
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 12-03-2020
Abstract: Perceptual experts have learned to rapidly and accurately perceive the structural regularities that define categories and identities within a domain. They extract important features and their relations more efficiently than novices. We used fingerprint examination to investigate expert-novice differences in feature choice. On each fingerprint within our set, experts and novices selected one feature they thought was most useful for distinguishing a particular print and one feature they thought was least useful. We found that experts and novices often differed in the features they chose, and experts tended to agree more with each other. However, any such expert-novice difference appeared to depend on the image at hand, typically emerging when salient or more conspicuous features of a fingerprint were unclear. We suggest that perceptual training ought to direct attention to useful features with the understanding that what is useful may change depending on the clarity of the stimuli.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 12-2017
DOI: 10.1037/H0101814
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 10-09-2019
Abstract: Evidence-based educational practice and policy relies on educational research to be accessible and reliable. For educators, creating the next generation of critical thinkers, collaborators, and effective communicators, is a complex educational problem, requiring a delicate marriage of methods and approaches for understanding the mind, behaviour, and social context of the learner in the digital age. As such, educational technology research plays an important role for informing practice and policy. However, reaching across the boundaries of research, policy, and practice, is inherently challenging, and can invoke unintended consequences. Miscommunications, and mistakes, are inevitable in interdisciplinary and applied science, but advances in technology now make it possible to openly share and translate educational technology research for policy and practice. Our aim in this paper is to describe how the emerging set of practices and philosophies within the Open Science movement can make educational technology research more transparent and aid translating it into practice.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 05-11-2021
Abstract: Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns have been raised about an ‘infodemic’, with information and misinformation being spread across multiple channels and mediums. Information consumption has also been associated with increased anxiety throughout the pandemic. Thus, the present study investigates the mediating role of state anxiety on the relationship between information consumption (defined as mean frequency of information consumption multiplied by number of information sources) and COVID-19 protective behaviours. We compare results across Australian and United States s les and account for personal risk perception and belief in misinformation about COVID-19. Cross-sectional data collected between 28 and 30 April 2020 were analysed using Bayesian structural equation modelling among participants from Australia (N = 201), and the United States (N = 306). State anxiety scores were above the conventional clinical cut-off. Information consumption was positively associated with state anxiety, personal risk perception, and COVID-19 protective behaviours in the Australian and the United States s les. Additionally, the relationship between information consumption and COVID-19 protective behaviours was positively mediated by state anxiety in both nations, suggesting some functional benefits of anxiety. Differences in risk perception and belief in misinformation existed between the Australian and United States s le. Findings provide support for current guidance from organisations such as the WHO, APA, and APS on limiting information consumption to reduce anxiety. To effectively communicate critical public health messaging while minimising potential burdens on mental health, there is a need to develop and test interventions that assist people in calibrating the extent and nature of their information consumption.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 28-06-2018
Abstract: Humans can see through the complexity of scenes, faces, and objects by quickly extracting their redundant low-spatial and low-dimensional global properties, or their style. It remains unclear, however, whether semantic coding is necessary, or whether visual stylistic information is sufficient, for people to recognize and discriminate complex images and categories. In two experiments, we systematically reduce the resolution of hundreds of unique paintings, birds, and faces, and test people’s ability to discriminate and recognize them. We show that the stylistic information retained at extremely low image resolutions is sufficient for visual recognition of images, and visual discrimination of categories. Averaging over the three domains, people were able to reliably recognize images reduced down to a single pixel, with large differences from chance discriminability across eight different image resolutions. People were also able to discriminate categories substantially above chance with an image resolution as low as 2×2 pixels. We situate our findings in the context of contemporary computational accounts of visual recognition, and contend that explicit encoding of the local features in the image, or knowledge of the semantic category, is not necessary for recognizing and distinguishing complex visual stimuli.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 05-11-2019
Abstract: When a fingerprint is located at a crime scene, a human examiner is counted upon to manually compare this print to those stored in a database. Several experiments have now shown that these professional analysts are highly accurate, but not infallible, much like other fields that involve high-stakes decision making. One method to offset mistakes in these safety-critical domains is to distribute these important decisions to groups of raters who independently assess the same information. This redundancy in the system allows it to continue operating effectively even in the face of rare and random errors. Here, we extend this “wisdom of crowds” approach to fingerprint analysis by comparing the performance of in iduals to crowds of professional analysts. We replicate the previous findings that in idual experts greatly outperform in idual novices, particularly in their false positive rate, but they do make mistakes. When we pool the decisions of small groups of experts by selecting the decision of the majority, however, their false positive rate decreases by up to 8% and their false negative rate decreases by up to 12%. Pooling the decisions of novices results in a similar drop in false negatives, but increases their false positive rate by up to 11%. Aggregating people’s judgements by selecting the majority decision performs better than selecting the decision of the most confident or the most experienced rater. Our results show that combining independent judgements from small groups of fingerprint analysts can improve their performance and prevent these mistakes from entering courts.
Publisher: No publisher found
Date: 2014
Publisher: University of California Press
Date: 2021
Abstract: In this article, we provide a toolbox of recommendations and resources for those aspiring to promote the uptake of open scientific practices. Open Science encompasses a range of behaviours that aim to improve the transparency of scientific research. This paper is ided into seven sections, each devoted to different groups or institutions in the research ecosystem: colleagues, students, departments and faculties, universities, academic libraries, journals, and funders. We describe the behavioural influences and incentives for each of these stakeholders as well as changes they can make to foster Open Science. Our primary goal, however, is to suggest actions that researchers can take to promote these behaviours, inspired by simple principles of behaviour change: make it easy, social, and attractive. In isolation, a small shift in one person’s behaviour may appear to make little difference, but when combined, many shifts can radically alter shared norms and culture. We offer this toolbox to assist in iduals and institutions in cultivating a more open research culture.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 16-10-2014
DOI: 10.1093/LPR/MGU018
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 08-01-2023
Abstract: This is a preprint of a chapter published in "Human Uses of Outer Space" - edited by Melissa de Zwart, John Culton, Stacey Henderson, Amit Srivastava, and Deborah Turnbull.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 06-2018
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 12-10-2023
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 23-08-2022
Abstract: We used a longitudinal randomised control experiment to compare the effect of specific practice (training on one form of a task) and varied practice (training on various forms of a task) on perceptual learning and transfer. Participants practiced a visual search task for ten hours over two- to four-weeks. The specific practice group searched for features only in fingerprints during each session whereas the varied practice group searched for features in five different image categories. Both groups were tested on a series of tasks at four time points: before training, midway through training, immediately after training ended, and six- to eight-weeks later. The specific group improved more during training and demonstrated greater pre-post performance gains than the varied group on a visual search task with untrained fingerprint images. Both groups improved equally on a visual search task with an untrained image category, but only the specific group’s performance dropped significantly when tested several weeks later. Finally, both groups improved equally on a series of untrained fingerprint tasks. Practice with respect to single category (versus many) instils better near transfer, but category-specific and category-general visual search training appear equally effective for developing task-general expertise.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 02-06-2017
Publisher: University of Queensland Library
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 10-12-2019
Abstract: Legal commentators widely agree that forensic examiners should articulate the reasons for their opinions. However, findings from cognitive science strongly suggest that people have little insight into the information they rely on to make decisions. And as in iduals gain expertise, they rely more on cognitive shortcuts that are not directly accessible through introspection. That is to say, the expert’s mind is a black box — both to the expert and to the trier of fact. This article focuses on black box expertise in the context of forensic examiners who interpret visual pattern evidence (eg fingerprints). The authors review black box expertise through the lens of cognitive scientific research. They then suggest that the black box nature of this expertise strains common law admissibility rules and trial safeguards.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 20-02-2018
DOI: 10.1007/S10071-018-1166-2
Abstract: Scarf et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci 113(40):11272-11276, 2016) demonstrated that pigeons, as with baboons (Grainger et al. in Science 336(6078):245-248, 2012 Ziegler in Psychol Sci. 0.1177/0956797612474322 , 2013), can be trained to display several behavioural hallmarks of human orthographic processing. But, Vokey and Jamieson (Psychol Sci 25(4):991-996, 2014) demonstrated that a standard, autoassociative neural network model of memory applied to pixel maps of the words and nonwords reproduces all of those results. In a subsequent report, Scarf et al. (Anim Cognit 20(5):999-1002, 2017) demonstrated that pigeons can reproduce one more marker of human orthographic processing: the ability to discriminate visually presented four-letter words from their mirror-reversed counterparts (e.g. "LEFT" vs. " "). The current report shows that the model of Vokey and Jamieson (2014) reproduces the results of Scarf et al. (2017) and reinforces the original argument: the recent results thought to support a conclusion of orthographic processing in pigeons and baboons are consistent with but do not force that conclusion.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 12-2017
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 05-2019
DOI: 10.1037/XHP0000628
Abstract: Humans can see through the complexity of scenes, faces, and objects by quickly extracting their redundant low-spatial and low-dimensional global properties, or their style. It remains unclear, however, whether semantic coding is necessary, or whether visual stylistic information is sufficient, for people to recognize and discriminate complex images and categories. In two experiments, we systematically reduce the resolution of hundreds of unique paintings, birds, and faces, and test people's ability to discriminate and recognize them. We show that the stylistic information retained at extremely low image resolutions is sufficient for visual recognition of images and visual discrimination of categories. Averaging over the 3 domains, people were able to reliably recognize images reduced down to a single pixel, with large differences from chance discriminability across 8 different image resolutions. People were also able to discriminate categories substantially above chance with an image resolution as low as 2 × 2 pixels. We situate our findings in the context of contemporary computational accounts of visual recognition and contend that explicit encoding of the local features in the image, or knowledge of the semantic category, is not necessary for recognizing and distinguishing complex visual stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 05-12-2016
DOI: 10.3758/S13423-016-1211-6
Abstract: Experience identifying visual objects and categories improves generalization within the same class (e.g., discriminating bird species improves transfer to new bird species), but does such perceptual expertise transfer to coarser category judgments? We tested whether fingerprint experts, who spend their days comparing pairs of prints and judging whether they were left by the same finger or two different fingers, can generalize their finger discrimination expertise to people more broadly. That is, can these experts identify prints from Jones's right thumb and prints from Jones's right index finger as instances of the same "Jones" category? Novices and experts were both sensitive to the style of a stranger's prints despite lower levels of confidence, experts were significantly more sensitive to this style than novices. This expert advantage persisted even when we reduced the number of exemplars provided. Our results demonstrate that perceptual expertise can be flexible to upwards shifts in the level of specificity, suggesting a dynamic memory retrieval process.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 31-07-2020
Abstract: People who have had extensive training in a domain perform far better on many perceptual tasks than those without any training. Perceptual experts tend to constrain their attention to features that will enable them to make decisions quickly and accurately, and time and again their expertise is shown to be domain-specific. We compared a group of fingerprint examiners to a group of novices on their visual search ability across two experiments – one where participants searched for corresponding features and another where they searched for points of difference. We varied how useful the target feature was and whether participants searched for these targets in a typical fingerprint or one that had been scrambled. In both instances, the experts more efficiently located target fragments (or changes) when searching for them in intact fingerprints, but not scrambled fingerprints. In Experiment 1, experts more efficiently located useful target fragments compared to novices, but not less useful fragments. Even though the nature of the task may influence the strategies that participants use, the visual search advantages that experts enjoy appear to hinge on a sensitivity to what is useful and on the structural regularities of their domain. These results align with a domain-specific account of expertise and suggest that perceptual training ought to involve learning to attend to task-critical features.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 03-2017
DOI: 10.1037/CEP0000124
Abstract: Are strategies for learning in education effective for learning in applied visual domains, such as fingerprint identification? We compare the effect of practice with immediate corrective feedback (feedback training), generating labels for features of matching and mismatching fingerprints (labels training), and contrasting matching and mismatching fingerprints (contrast training). We benchmark these strategies against a baseline of regular practice discriminating fingerprints. We found that all 3 training protocols-feedback, labels, and contrasts-resulted in a significantly greater ability to discriminate new pairs of prints (independent of response bias) than the baseline training protocol. We also found that feedback and labels training produced significantly lower rates of bias (i.e., learners in these groups were less likely to overcall matches) compared with baseline training. Our results demonstrate 3 different ways to boost expertise with matching prints, and have direct application to training perceptual expertise. (PsycINFO Database Record
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2017
DOI: 10.1016/J.SCIJUS.2016.11.005
Abstract: 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 article highlights a series of important findings and insights of relevance to forensic practitioners. These include research on human perception, memory, context information, expertise, decision-making, communication, experience, verification, confidence, and feedback. The aim of this article is to sensitise forensic practitioners (and lawyers and judges) to a range of potentially significant issues, and encourage them to engage with research in these domains so that they may adapt procedures to improve performance, mitigate risks and reduce errors. Doing so will reduce the ide between forensic practitioners and research scientists as well as improve the value and utility of forensic science evidence.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 04-2021
Abstract: Manuscript accepted for publication at Collabra: Psychology. In this article, we provide a toolbox of recommendations and resources for those who desire to promote the uptake of open scientific practices. Open Science encompasses a range of behaviours that aim to improve the transparency of scientific research. This paper is ided into seven sections, each devoted to different group or institution in the research ecosystem: colleagues, students, departments and faculties, universities, academic libraries, journals, and funders. We describe the behavioural influences and incentives for each of these stakeholders and changes they can make to foster Open Science. Our primary goal is to suggest actions that researchers can take to promote these behaviours, inspired by simple principles of behaviour change: make it easy, social, and attractive. In isolation, a small shift in one person’s behaviour may appear to make little difference, but when combined, many shifts can radically alter shared norms and culture. We offer this toolbox to assist in iduals and institutions in cultivating a more open research culture.
Publisher: No publisher found
Date: 2014
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 11-2018
Abstract: Evidence accumulation models have been used to describe the cognitive processes underlying performance in tasks involving two-choice decisions about unidimensional stimuli, such as motion or orientation. Given the multidimensionality of natural stimuli, however, we might expect qualitatively different patterns of evidence accumulation in more applied perceptual tasks. One domain that relies heavily on human decisions about complex natural stimuli is fingerprint discrimination. We know little about the ability of evidence accumulation models to account for the dynamic decision process of a fingerprint examiner resolving if two different prints belong to the same finger or not. Here, we apply a dynamic decision-making model — the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) — to fingerprint discrimination decisions in order to gain insight into the cognitive processes underlying these complex perceptual judgments. Across three experiments, we show that the LBA provides an accurate description of the fingerprint discrimination decision process with manipulations in visual noise, speed-accuracy emphasis, and training. Our results demonstrate that the LBA is a promising model for furthering our understanding of applied decision-making with naturally varying visual stimuli.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 09-06-2023
Abstract: The development and commercialisation of medical artificial intelligence (AI) decision-systems far outpaces our understanding of their value for clinicians. Although applicable across many forms of medicine, we focus on characterising the diagnostic decisions of radiologists, review the differences between clinician decision-making and medical AI model decision-making, and reveal how these differences pose fundamental challenges for integrating AI into radiology. We argue that clinicians are contextually motivated, mentally resourceful decision-makers, whereas AI models are contextually stripped, correlational decision-makers, and discuss misconceptions about clinician-AI interaction stemming from this misalignment of capabilities. We outline a series of recommendations for future research to enhance the safety and usability of AI models in high-risk medical decision-making contexts.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 12-2022
DOI: 10.1037/XHP0001057
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-04-2016
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 16-07-2014
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2016
DOI: 10.1037/LHB0000154
Abstract: Previous demonstrations of context effects in the forensic comparison sciences have shown that the number of "match" responses a person makes can be swayed by case information. Less clear is whether these effects are a result of changes in accuracy (e.g., discrimination ability), a shift in response bias (e.g., tendency to say "match" or "no match") or a mix of the 2. We present a series of experiments where we use a signal detection framework to examine the effects of case information (separately) on forensic comparison accuracy and response bias. We also explore the role of familiarity as 1 potential mechanism for case information to sway accuracy. In Experiment 1, case information about crimes perceived to be more severe swayed people to say "match" more, but had little bearing on their ability to discriminate matching and nonmatching fingerprint pairs. In Experiment 2, case information did affect accuracy when it was familiar (i.e., if a previous similar case was associated with a "match" then people were more likely to also rate the current case as a "match," even though it was not). Even when we blinded people to all extrinsic case information in Experiment 3, accuracy was significantly affected by the familiarity of the fingerprints. These results demonstrate that contextual factors can have different (and independent) influences on accuracy and response bias and that even subtle information can affect accuracy if it is sufficiently similar to the case or trace at hand.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 05-11-2019
Abstract: Across research areas, general issues of low statistical power, publication bias, undisclosed flexibility in data analysis, and researcher degrees of freedom, can be recipes for irreproducibility. To address the problem, a reform movement known as the ‘credibility revolution’ emphasises the need for greater transparency in how research is conducted. In this article, we describe a general approach to creating a culture of openness—tailored for expertise researchers—and describe how and why practices such as ‘preregistration,’ ‘open notebooks,’ ‘open data,’ ‘open materials,’ and ‘open communication,’ might be applied to research on experts. We argue that adopting these practices helps to connect end-users with the entire research lifecycle, and helps to reconnect researchers with the process of gaining knowledge. By sharing notes about our predictions and plans along the way, we are forced to confront their merits. By documenting design and data analytic decisions ahead of time, and by sharing data and materials, we make errors and insights more discoverable. And by inviting research partners, expert practitioners, and the public into the lab, we stand the best chance of successfully translating research into practice.
Start Date: 02-2019
End Date: 12-2024
Amount: $364,188.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 07-2023
End Date: 06-2026
Amount: $390,574.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity