Jack of all trades, master of one: Domain-specific and domain-general contributions to perceptual expertise in visual comparison
Listed in
This article is not in any list yet, why not save it to one of your lists.Abstract
People vary substantially in their ability to visually compare or ‘match’ patterns – some are much more accurate than others. This is a varied and generalisable ability in the general population – for example, novices who excel in fingerprint-matching also excel in firearms-matching. Forensic feature-comparison examiners also excel in this task, but no research has investigated the generalisability of their skill. The extent to which this superiority will generalise and predict their ability in related tasks is unclear. In this study, we investigated the generalisability of perceptual expertise amongst forensic examiners by comparing their performance to novices and other examiners within and outside their area of expertise. We recruited 85 experts from three forensic disciplines (face, fingerprint, and firearms) and asked them to complete four different visual comparison tasks: faces, fingerprints, firearms, and novel objects. Examiners displayed domain-specific expertise: they outperformed novices and other examiners within their domain of visual comparison expertise. Yet some of their skill also generalised: examiners also outperformed novices outside their area of expertise. These results provide key insight into the domain-specific and domain-general contributions of forensic examiners’ perceptual expertise. Forensic expertise lends some generalisable skill to other visual comparison tasks – but domain expertise still leads to the best performance.
