Searston Rachel A, Thompson Matthew B, Robson Samuel G, Tangen Jason M
School of Psychology, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia.
School of Psychology, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2025 Feb 4;10(1):3. doi: 10.1186/s41235-025-00610-z.
Visual inference involves using prior knowledge and contextual cues to make educated guesses about incomplete or ambiguous information. This study explores the role of visual inference as a function of expertise in the context of fingerprint examination, where professional examiners need to determine whether two fingerprints were left by the same person, or not, often based on limited or impoverished visual information. We compare expert and novice performance on two tasks: inferring the missing details of a print at an artificial blank spot (Experiment 1) and identifying the missing surrounds of a print given only a small fragment of visual detail (Experiment 2). We hypothesized that experts would demonstrate superior performance by leveraging their extensive experience with global fingerprint patterns. Consistent with our predictions, we found that while both experts and novices performed above chance, experts consistently outperformed novices. These findings suggest that expertise in fingerprint examination involves a heightened sensitivity to gist, or global image properties within a print, enabling experts to make more accurate inferences about missing details. These results align with prior research on perceptual expertise in other expert domains, such as radiology, and extend our understanding of scene and face recognition to fingerprint examination. Our findings show that expertise emerges from an ability to combine local and global visual information-experts skillfully process both the fine details and overall patterns in fingerprints. This research provides insight into how perceptual expertise supports accurate visual discrimination in a high-stakes, real-world task with broader implications for theoretical models of visual cognition.
视觉推理涉及利用先验知识和上下文线索对不完整或模糊的信息进行有根据的猜测。本研究探讨了在指纹鉴定背景下，视觉推理作为专业技能的一种功能所发挥的作用，在该背景下，专业鉴定人员常常需要基于有限或匮乏的视觉信息来判断两枚指纹是否由同一人留下。我们比较了专家和新手在两项任务中的表现：推断人工空白处指纹缺失的细节（实验1）以及仅根据一小部分视觉细节识别指纹缺失的周边部分（实验2）。我们假设专家们能够凭借其对整体指纹图案的丰富经验表现得更为出色。与我们的预测一致，我们发现虽然专家和新手的表现都高于随机水平，但专家始终优于新手。这些发现表明，指纹鉴定方面的专业技能涉及对指纹中主旨或全局图像属性的更高敏感度，这使专家能够对缺失细节做出更准确的推断。这些结果与先前在放射学等其他专家领域关于感知专业技能的研究一致，并将我们对场景和面部识别的理解扩展到了指纹鉴定。我们的研究结果表明，专业技能源于结合局部和全局视觉信息的能力——专家能够巧妙地处理指纹中的细微细节和整体图案。这项研究为感知专业技能如何在高风险的现实世界任务中支持准确的视觉辨别提供了见解，对视觉认知的理论模型具有更广泛的意义。
