Aside from being a relatively limited population, previous studies have encountered difficulties in obtaining the participation of profilers for empirically based research concerned with critiquing their profiling abilities. Thus, an examination of the proposed issues of this study through the collection of a suitably large group of profiler participants proved difficult. Consequently, an alternative source of participants was necessary. A series of recent studies that empirically tested the underlying skills considered necessary for proficient profiling found that skills associated with an understanding of human behavior and logical and objective reasoning were those most closely aligned with profiling accuracy. From these studies, the two types of participants whose performance most closely rivaled that of the sampled profilers were university science sophomores and psychologists. Consequently, the current study recruited 122 science sophomores from 2 Australian universities. Forty-five percent of the participants were male, and 55 percent were female. The study involved completing modified versions of the questionnaire originally designed by Kocsis et al. (2000). The first section of the instrument contained a case summary of a previously solved homicide investigation that originated from the files of an Australian police jurisdiction. The summary includes, but was not limited to, such materials as crime scene photographs and reports, schematic diagrams, forensic examinations, postmortem and pathology reports, and background information. All of the information was available to police detectives just before the offender was identified. The second section of the questionnaire contained a form that requested participants to sign a declaration acknowledging that they were not previously familiar with the facts of the case. The third and final section of the instrument was a multiple-choice questionnaire that surveyed four areas in describing the unknown offender. These included physical characteristics of the offender, cognitions associated with the offense, behaviors associated with the offense, and personal history and habits of the offender. Since the study was concerned with exploring the effects of case material on profiling proficiency, four separate versions of the case information section were compiled. Groups of participants were presented with either a full case package, only narrative or visual case material, narrative material with a written description of the visual material, or a control condition in which no case material was provided. The findings indicate that profiling proficiency was significantly influenced by the amount of case material available, with optimal proficiency likely achieved by the presence of all forms of material. Participants provided with only the narrative case materials surpassed those with visual materials. 1 table and 23 references