Skill Characteristics of Forensic Handwriting Examiners Associated with Simulated Handwritten Text

The assessment of the process of production of handwriting (naturally written, disguised or simulated) is an important step in forensic examinations and may impact on any authorship opinion offered. However, there is currently little empirical data on the skill of forensic handwriting examiners in discriminating between disguised and simulated writing processes. The results reported here form part of a larger investigation to that end. The trial consisted of 100 pairs of handwriting samples, each with a naturally written comparison sample, and a questioned sample that was either disguised by the comparison writer, or written by another writer attempting to simulate the comparison writer’s handwriting features. The simulated writings were made with or without practice and with or without a direct model of the target text in the comparison writer’s handwriting. Analysis revealed no significant differences between the correct or misleading (erroneous) scores of any of the combinations of simulated writing types. Simulated writings attracted high misleading and inconclusive scores indicating that the predictor features that FHEs use to form opinions on the un-natural writing samples in this study were not effective.