In many real-life contexts, observers are required to search for targets that are rarely present (e.g. tumours in X-rays; dangerous items in airport security screenings). Despite the rarity of these items, they are of enormous importance for the health and safety of the public, yet they are easily missed during visual search. This is referred to…

Perceptual expertise is typically domain-specific and rarely generalises beyond an expert's domain of experience. Forensic feature-comparison examiners outperform the norm in domain-specific visual comparison, but emerging research suggests that they show advantages on other similar tasks outside their domain of expertise. For example, fingerprint…

Recent work has shown that perceptual training can be used to improve the performance of novices in real-world visual classification tasks with medical images, but it is unclear which perceptual training methods are the most effective, especially for difficult medical image discrimination tasks. We investigated several different perceptual…

The diagnostic feature-detection theory (DFT) of eyewitness identification is based on facial information that is diagnostic versus non-diagnostic of suspect guilt. It primarily has been tested by discounting non-diagnostic information at retrieval, typically by surrounding a single suspect showup with good fillers to create a lineup. We tested…

Expert fingerprint examiners demonstrate impressive feats of memory that may support their accuracy when making high-stakes identification decisions. Understanding the interplay between expertise and memory is therefore critical. Across two experiments, we tested fingerprint examiners and novices on their visual short-term memory for fingerprints.…

Past studies of emotion and mood on memory have mostly focused on the learning of emotional material in the laboratory or on the consequences of a punctate catastrophic event. However, the influence of a long-lasting global condition on memory and learning has not been studied. The COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately offered a unique situation to…

Although faces of in-group members are generally thought to be processed holistically, there are mixed findings on whether holistic processing remains robust for faces of out-group members and what factors contribute to holistic processing of out-group faces. This study examined how implicit social bias, experience with out-group members, and…

Visuospatial processing speed underlies several cognitive functions critical for successful completion of everyday tasks, including driving and walking. While it is widely accepted that visuospatial processing speed peaks in early adulthood, performance across the lifespan remains incompletely characterized. Additionally, there remains a lack of…