Fingerprint examiners are among those who are skilled at pattern matching. Photo: George Prentzas / Unsplash
Are you a details person? Have you watched lots of forensic scientists doing their thing on TV and reckon you’ve got what it takes to join them? A Canterbury University researcher is keen to find naturally gifted people with the “super abilities” required to match complex visual patterns without any training – and she’s developed an online test to assess them.
Psychology lecturer Dr. Bethany Growns tells Nights that she discovered the existence of ‘super-matchers’ while conducting research into the expertise of forensic scientists.
“We started to see people in our data that were really good at pattern matching without any training or experience. They were good at many different kinds of pattern-matching tasks, from fingerprints, faces, shoes, firearms. They seemed to be naturally gifted in pattern matching.”
What makes a super-matcher? Growns says evidence so far suggests that super-matching is a kind of cognitive or perceptual ability that’s different to personality or IQ.
“It's not necessarily the case that people who have really high intelligence or IQ are really good at pattern matching, or even people that are more diligent or more motivated are good at pattern matching. It appears to be kind of a trait that naturally varies, that some people just have and others don't.”
Super-matching is a related skill to super-recognition, which is a superior ability to remember faces in the general population, Growns says. If you don’t have either skill, blame your parents: Growns says current thinking is that both skills are genetic.
Dr Bethany Growns is on the hunt for super-matchers. Photo: Screenshot
Just two to three percent of the population are estimated to be super-matchers. Growns has developed a test to people assess their skills by judging a series of complex visual patterns. one of the reasons I've launched this test so that we can find a whole lot of super matches and compare them to experts to see how both groups do
Growns says it’s possible that some forensic scientists are also super matchers, but usually they’ve acquired these skills after years of experience and training.
While naturally gifted super-matchers can race through pattern tests, Growns says trained forensic experts are better because they work slowly.
“They process feature by feature, comparing one little bit of an image to another little bit of an image at a time. And somehow these super-matchers are really good at doing it really quickly.
“Scientifically we don't really know why super-matchers are better. We know that they're better at doing it faster, but we don't really know what's going on in their brains that makes them so unique and special. So that's why we're hoping people will take the test so that we can recruit enough of them, so we can start answering some of the many questions that we do have about them.”
Are you a super-matcher? This test may tell you. Photo: Dr Bethany Growns
The ‘Are You A Super-Matcher?’ test asks participants to judge 16 image matches. Scoring 15 or 16 out of 16 may indicate super-matcher status, Growns says.
“People that do score really highly can also provide their email addresses and sign up to an ongoing research registry that we also have at the University of Canterbury, where we have many tests, like fingerprint and face-matching, that they can further test their ability on.”
She says gathering more evidence about super-matchers may eventually prove useful to forensic organisations and police. While these skills can be applied to forensic science like fingerprint matching, Growns says it could also be useful when looking at other visual stimuli, such as radiographs in medicine.
“It would be great once we have a big evidence base about these people, for them to be recruited into forensic organizations and police. Forensic science has resulted in wrongful convictions in countries overseas like the US, even here. And so if we could recruit people that are naturally skilled in disability, we could theoretically avoid some of the errors that result in wrongful convictions from flawed forensic science evidence.”
