ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2022
Match me if you can: Evidence for a domain-general visual comparison ability.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Object recognition ability predicts category learning with medical images.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Trial
- Interpol review of forensic firearm examination, 2022-2025.Forensic science international. Synergy · 2026Review
- On the Continuum of Foundational Validity: Lessons from Eyewitness Science for Latent Fingerprint Examination.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Normative face recognition ability test scores vary across online participant pools.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Jack of all trades, master of one: domain-specific and domain-general contributions to perceptual expertise in visual comparison.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- The novel object-matching test (NOM Test): A psychometric measure of visual comparison ability.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Diverse types of expertise in facial recognition.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The neural correlates of domain-general visual ability.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- A method for quantifying individual decision thresholds of latent print examiners.Forensic science international. Synergy · 2023Article
- Interpol review of fingermarks and other body impressions 2019 - 2022).Forensic science international. Synergy · 2023Review
- Selecting police super-recognisers.PloS one · 2023Article
- The low prevalence effect in fingerprint comparison amongst forensic science trainees and novices.PloS one · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Visual comparison-comparing visual stimuli (e.g., fingerprints) side by side and determining whether they originate from the same or different source (i.e., "match")-is a complex discrimination task involving many cognitive and perceptual processes. Despite the real-world consequences of this task, which is often conducted by forensic scientists, little is understood about the psychological processes underpinning this ability. There are substantial individual differences in visual comparison accuracy amongst both professionals and novices. The source of this variation is unknown, but may reflect a domain-general and naturally varying perceptual ability. Here, we investigate this by comparing individual differences (N = 248 across two studies) in four visual comparison domains: faces, fingerprints, firearms, and artificial prints. Accuracy on all comparison tasks was significantly correlated and accounted for a substantial portion of variance (e.g., 42% in Exp. 1) in performance across all tasks. Importantly, this relationship cannot be attributed to participants' intrinsic motivation or skill in other visual-perceptual tasks (visual search and visual statistical learning). This paper provides novel evidence of a reliable, domain-general visual comparison ability.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.