'Super-matcher' study wins $360,000 funding boost

Eye-tracking technology will be used in new University of Canterbury research, comparing the skills of forensic scientists with ‘super-matcher’ novices. 

The study led by Dr Bethany Growns, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC), will explore how these two groups process visual information during tasks such as fingerprint-matching. 

The world-first research has recently been awarded a 2024 Te Pūtea Rangahau a Marsden Fund Fast-Start grant of $360,000 over the next three years.  

Forensic scientists train for years to achieve exceptional performance in identifying and comparing visual patterns such as fingerprints, faces and the microscopic marks made on a bullet when it is fired from a gun. But, Dr Growns says a group known as ‘super-matchers’, are ordinary people with a rare talent that allows them to excel in these tasks without any relevant training or experience. 

“This project will investigate how trained experts and untrained super-matchers use visual information,” she says. “Both groups are very accurate at pattern-matching tasks but they excel in very different ways.  

“Forensic scientists learn special strategies where they compare patterns slowly, deliberately and feature-by-feature, while super-matchers seem to use a different strategy altogether. The theory is that super-matchers may process sensory information in a way that allows them to quickly and intuitively recognise and compare patterns,” she says. 

“Trained experts like forensic scientists also process sensory information in a unique way compared to novices, but it’s unclear whether these abilities arise after years of training or experience in firearms, fingerprint and facial comparison, or whether they may also be the result of a pre-existing perceptual skill.” 

The international research team will use behavioural and eye-tracking experiments to understand the information processing strategies and techniques used by each group, and identify the cognitive mechanisms involved.  

Dr Growns hopes the project will shed light on how human perception works, and could influence future training programmes in forensic science, medicine or border security. 

“Our work is about trying to improve performance and outcomes in the criminal justice system to avoid errors and potential miscarriages of justice,” she says. 

The Marsden-funded project builds on another recent study, also led by Dr Growns, which found that facial comparison, fingerprint and firearms examiners are better than novices at matching visual patterns even in areas outside what they have trained and specialised in. For example, fingerprint examiners not only outperformed face and firearms examiners as well as novices in their own area of expertise, they also outperformed novices in face and firearms pattern-matching.  

The findings suggest some forensic science examiners have a generalisable skill for pattern matching. This goes against earlier research that has found that many experts only excel in tasks that they have extensive experience in.  

“This is exciting, new research showing that forensic examiners are a special group of experts that have some level of generalisable and transferable skill outside their domain of expertise,” Dr Growns says.  

The new project comparing forensic experts and super-matchers is one of 10 UC projects to receive Marsden Fund grants this year worth a combined $7.34 million over the next three years.  

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