Perception
Is there a general skill for telling if two images match?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People who are good at judging whether two faces match also tend to be good at matching fingerprints, bullet casings and even novel prints, suggesting a general 'matching' ability.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Two preregistered online correlational studies in which every participant completed four same/different visual comparison tasks plus discriminant-validity measures, analysed with correlations, Bayes factors and principal component analysis.
- N
- N=124 · 124 Prolific participants in Experiment 1 and a separate 124 in Experiment 2 (US residents); no exclusions in either.
- Population
- Adult online participants from the general population with no forensic training.
- Outcome
- Signal-detection sensitivity (d') on face, fingerprint, firearms (cartridge case) and artificial-print comparison; intrinsic motivation (Exp. 1); visual search reaction time and visual statistical learning (Exp. 2).
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Key findings
In both studies, sensitivity on all four comparison tasks correlated positively, and one principal component on which all four loaded explained 41.99% (Experiment 1) and 34.92% (Experiment 2) of the variance. Intrinsic motivation, visual search and statistical learning did not load on this component and were largely unrelated to comparison accuracy, with Bayes factors mostly supporting no correlation. Correlations between tasks were only moderate, and face matching had the most task-specific variance, suggesting a mix of general and stimulus-specific skill.
Methodology
In two preregistered online studies, 124 adults each judged whether pairs of faces, fingerprints, cartridge cases from firearms, and artificial prints stamped from carved potatoes came from the same source. Performance was scored as sensitivity (d'), which separates accuracy from a tendency to say 'same'. Experiment 1 also measured intrinsic motivation, and Experiment 2 added a visual search task and a visual statistical learning task to test whether any shared ability was just general visual skill.
Limitations
Participants were untrained novices, so the authors note it is unclear whether a general matching ability still matters for professional examiners, whose expertise is usually domain-specific. The fingerprint tasks had below-standard reliability (alpha around .61-.62), which can weaken correlations involving them. The design is correlational, so it identifies shared variance but not the mechanism behind it (e.g. holistic vs featural processing). Samples were online US or Prolific volunteers, and the applied suggestion of selecting examiners by this ability was not tested directly.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Not yet placed on a claim. This paper has study layers, but no concept page yet cites it as support, challenge, or qualifier.
Related papers in this topic
Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.