Lifeguard drowning detection in swimming pools and beach settings is influenced by experience. The current experiment explores the cognitive skills that might underlie this experience effect. Lifeguard and non-lifeguard performance in a domain-free multiple object avoidance (MOA) task and a partially domain-free functional field of view (FFOV) task was compared to performance on an occlusion-based drowning detection task. Lifeguards performed better than non-lifeguards on the MOA task and the FFOV central task (identifying whether an isolated swimmer was drowning). However, only performance in the central FFOV task was associated with performance in the occlusion-based drowning detection task, and this was the only part of the two tasks that was not domain-free. These results suggest lifeguard drowning detection is mainly driven through the learned ability to process behaviours of drowning swimmers quicker than non-lifeguards. Therefore, it may be possible to train novices' ability to detect drowning swimmers through an exposure task.