What is confirmation bias?

Seeking out evidence to confirm one's beliefs while ignoring disconfirming evidence.

What does cognitive dissonance refer to?

The discomfort that arises when two beliefs or a belief and a behavior conflict, leading to a change in belief or behavior to resolve the dissonance.

Define bottom-up processing.

Processing where outside data drives the system, with information processed at higher levels until a match is found in memory.

Define top-down processing.

Processing where bottom-up information is mediated by factors like prior experience, knowledge, beliefs, and expectations.

How can top-down processing be beneficial?

It can make information processing more efficient and faster, and help interpret ambiguous information.

What is contextual bias?

When a decision is influenced by factors outside of the task at hand.

Why is forensic science vulnerable to bias?

Due to ambiguous evidence, lack of objective standards, numerous contextual cues, perceptions of infallibility, and limited immediate identification of mistakes.

What was the focus of Dror et al.'s (2005) study?

Participants decided if two fingerprints matched, with manipulated task difficulty and contextual information.

What effect did high emotional context have on ambiguous tasks in Dror et al.'s study?

Participants in high emotional conditions were more likely to find a match.

What did Osborne & Zajac (2016) find regarding emotional context?

Emotional context needed to be crime-related for an effect to occur; it was not enough on its own.

How do experts differ in their decision-making?

Experts filter out irrelevant information, simplify tasks, utilize past experience, and make quicker decisions.

What is a downside of expertise in forensic science?

Expertise can lead to automaticity, less articulable decisions, more defined expectations, reliance on non-data factors, and snap judgments, increasing vulnerability to bias.

What is the cost of automaticity in expert decision-making?

Decisions become less easily articulated and may rely less on data.

What can be done to mitigate bias in forensic science?

Awareness, formal bias appraisals, sneaky bias appraisals, removing context, and peer review.

What did the NRC Report (2009) say about contextual bias?

It highlighted that forensic science disciplines are beginning to recognize contextual bias and its subtle dangers.

What is the implication of experts believing they are immune to bias?

It can lead to overconfidence and increased susceptibility to biases.

What was the main finding regarding task ambiguity in Dror et al.'s study?

Contextual information biases the way gaps are filled but does not override clear bottom-up information.

What was the methodology used in Osborne & Zajac's replication of Dror et al.'s study?

They presented half the participants with increasing emotional context while the other half received no contextual information.

What is the significance of the findings from Dror et al. and Osborne & Zajac?

They suggest that emotional context significantly influences decision-making in forensic science, especially with ambiguous stimuli.