We found that the presence of the accompanying comparison
print affected how many minutiae were perceived by the expert
latent print examiners. These differences were statistically
significant (t(9) = 2.38, p = .021; with an effect size, r = .62).
Interestingly, as evident in Table 1, the presence of the accompanying
matching comparison print mainly reduced the number of
minutiae perceived. This is consistent with attention guided visual
search, whereby our cognitive system operates within the
contextual expectation. It is important to note that the reduced
number of minutiae was perhaps due to the comparison print
being from the same source (a match); if it had been a non-match,