People can fail to notice objects and events in their visual environment when their attention is engaged elsewhere. This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness, and its consequences can be costly for important real-world decisions. However, not noticing certain visual information could also signal expertise in a domain. In this study, we…

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…

Domain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain. This is often observed in visual domains involving skilled searches, such as athletics referees, or professional visual searchers (e.g., security and medical screeners). Although existing research has compared expert to novice performance…

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre-existing perceptual and…