Domain-General Individual Differences in Visual Comparison: Generalisability and Stability of Visual Comparison Ability Re-Visited

Visual comparison is the ability to ‘match’ visual stimuli like fingerprints or faces and decide whether they are from the same source or different sources (e.g., fingerprint-matching). Limited research has investigated individual differences in this ability. In this paper, we present the results of three studies that explore the generalisability and stability of five visual comparison tasks (fingerprints, faces, artificial-prints, footwear and toolmarks). We report data from three new studies examining the generalisability and stability of footwear comparison (Exp. 1) and toolmark comparison (Exp. 2), as well as the generalisability of all five comparison tasks (Exp. 3). Our results reveal that visual comparison ability generalises across all five comparison tasks and has stable test–retest reliability over time.