School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Law School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2024 Oct 29;9(1):73. doi: 10.1186/s41235-024-00596-0.
Perceptual expertise is typically domain-specific and rarely generalises beyond an expert's domain of experience. Forensic feature-comparison examiners outperform the norm in domain-specific visual comparison, but emerging research suggests that they show advantages on other similar tasks outside their domain of expertise. For example, fingerprint examiners not only outperform novices in fingerprint comparison, but also in face comparison. Yet, the extent to which their skills generalise is poorly understood. 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. However, while individual differences in examiners' performance within their domain of experience were associated with their performance in a novel comparison task, they were not related to their performance on tasks outside their expert domain. 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 best performance is still seen within examiners' domain of expertise.
知觉专长通常是特定领域的，很少能超越专家的经验领域。法庭特征比对鉴定人在特定领域的视觉比对中表现优于常人，但新兴研究表明，他们在专业领域之外的其他类似任务中也表现出优势。例如，指纹鉴定人不仅在指纹比对中优于新手，而且在面部比对中也是如此。然而，他们的技能在多大程度上具有通用性还不太清楚。在这项研究中，我们通过比较法医鉴定人在四个不同视觉比较任务（面部、指纹、枪支和新物体）中的表现，来研究知觉专长在法医鉴定人中的通用性。我们招募了来自三个法医领域（面部、指纹和枪支）的 85 名专家，并要求他们完成以下四个不同的视觉比较任务：面部、指纹、枪支和新物体。鉴定人表现出特定领域的专长：他们在自己的视觉比较专业领域胜过新手和其他鉴定人。然而，他们的一些技能也具有通用性：鉴定人在自己专业领域之外也胜过新手。然而，虽然鉴定人在其经验领域内的表现存在个体差异，但这些差异与他们在新比较任务中的表现无关，也与他们在专业领域之外的任务表现无关。这些结果为法庭鉴定人知觉专长的特定领域和非特定领域的贡献提供了关键的见解。法医专长为其他视觉比较任务提供了一些通用技能，但最佳表现仍在鉴定人的专业领域内。
