Jason Tangen

University of Queensland

Visual Expertise and Identification

 

Many domains of visual expertise (e.g., radiology, cytology, dermatology) involve experiential knowledge based on many prior instances. Learning about the variability of instances between and within categories serves as a rich source of analogies to permit efficient classification. But how does visual expertise develop in domains of identification (e.g., fingerprint or unfamiliar face matching) where the question of identity is based on a single member? I'll discuss several experiments designed to gain a better understanding of the source of identification errors, the factors that influence performance, and the nature of expertise in identification. Even though examiners believe that a slow, careful, and highly analytic approach is critical for matching fingerprints, our results from these experiments and others suggest otherwise. These findings indicate that identification experts rely heavily on nonanalytic processing, and they perform accurately when information is sparse—experts can do a lot with a little.