The effect of expertise, target usefulness and domain-specificity on visual search
People who have had extensive training in a domain perform far better on many perceptual tasks than those without any training. Perceptual experts tend to constrain their attention to features that will enable them to make decisions quickly and accurately, and time and again their expertise is shown to be domain-specific. We compared a group of fingerprint examiners to a group of novices on their visual search ability across two experiments – one where participants searched for corresponding features and another where they searched for points of difference. We varied how useful the target feature was and whether participants searched for these targets in a typical fingerprint or one that had been scrambled. In both instances, the experts more efficiently located target fragments (or changes) when searching for them in intact fingerprints, but not scrambled fingerprints. In Experiment 1, experts more efficiently located useful target fragments compared to novices, but not less useful fragments. Even though the nature of the task may influence the strategies that participants use, the visual search advantages that experts enjoy appear to hinge on a sensitivity to what is useful and on the structural regularities of their domain. 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.