The effect of expertise, target usefulness and image structure on visual search

Experts outperform novices on many cognitive and perceptual tasks. Extensive training has tuned experts to the most relevant information in their specific domain, allowing them to make decisions quickly and accurately. We compared a group of fingerprint examiners to a group of novices on their ability to search for information in fingerprints across two experiments—one where participants searched for target features within a single fingerprint and another where they searched for points of difference between two fingerprints. In both experiments, we also varied how useful the target feature was and whether participants searched for these targets in a typical fingerprint or one that had been scrambled. Experts more efficiently located targets when searching for them in intact but not scrambled fingerprints. In Experiment 1, we also found that experts more efficiently located target features classified as more useful compared to novices, but this expert-novice difference was not present when the target feature was classified as less useful. The usefulness of the target may therefore have influenced the search strategies that participants used, and the visual search advantages that experts display appear to depend on their vast experience with visual regularity in fingerprints. These results align with a domain-specific account of expertise and suggest that perceptual training ought to involve learning to attend to task-critical features.