THE IMPACT OF TIME, AGE AND FREQUENCY OF USE ON RECOGNIZING PERSONAL ITEMS OF OUR CLOSEST ONES: FORENSIC IMPLICATIONS. PRELIMINARY RESULTS

BONILLA, MATÍAS; VIDAL VANESSA; LEÓN, CANDELA S; URRETA BENITEZ, FACUNDO; CECILIA FORCATO

Congreso; Congreso Anual SAN2021; 2021

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

Sometimes people have to recognize belongings of close ones that were found in places where, for example, genocides took place. This is done in order to pinpoint a missingperson´s last whereabouts and in some cases because the family asks to keep with their belongings. To do this, one part of the process is asking the relatives of the missingperson to identify the items. However, in some cases (e.g. the missing people during the last Argentine military dictatorship) these procedures have been put in doubt by thelegal system in order to prevent errors such as two or more families recognizing the same item as their own and thus to prevent nonsense re-exposure to traumaticmemories. To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of studies evaluating our performance on recognition of clothes from close ones. It is known that our capacity tocorrectly recognize items depends on various factors, such as age, frequency of item exposure, level of stress, sleep, among others [1-4]. Here, we will discuss preliminarydata of how different factors such as time, age and frequency of use modulate the capacity to correctly and falsely recognize personal items of close ones. These results canenlighten and help the everyday practice of organizationssuch asthe ?Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology?(EAAF) to make decisions about the reliability of the clothingrecognition by the victim?s relatives.