There is substantial evidence for individual differences in personality and cognitive abilities, but we lack clear intuitions about individual differences in visual abilities. Previous work on this topic has typically compared performance with only 2 categories, each measured with only 1 task. This approach is insufficient for demonstration of domain-general effects. Most previous work has used familiar object categories, for which experience may vary between participants and categories, thereby reducing correlations that would stem from a common factor. In Study 1, we adopted a latent variable approach to test for the first time whether there is a domain-general object recognition ability, o. We assessed whether shared variance between latent factors representing performance for each of 5 novel object categories could be accounted for by a single higher-order factor. On average, 89% of the variance of lower-order factors denoting performance on novel object categories could be accounted for by a higher-order factor, providing strong evidence for o. Moreover, o also accounted for a moderate proportion of variance in tests of familiar object recognition. In Study 2, we assessed whether the strong association across categories in object recognition is due to third-variable influences. We find that o has weak to moderate associations with a host of cognitive, perceptual, and personality constructs and that a clear majority of the variance in and covariance between performance on different categories is independent of fluid intelligence. This work provides the first demonstration of a reliable, specific, and domain-general object recognition ability, and suggest a rich framework for future work in this area.

Recent work suggests that some aspects of lung nodule detection ability may relate to object recognition ability. However, this work only sampled radiological novices. Here, we further investigate whether object recognition ability predicts lung nodule detection ability (as measured by the Vanderbilt Chest Radiograph Test or VCRT), after controlling for experience and fluid intelligence, in a sample of radiologists and nonradiologists. We find that radiological experience accounts for approximately 50% of VCRT variance. After controlling for experience, fluid intelligence and object recognition ability account for an additional 15% of VCRT variance. These results suggest that while training is key in learning to detect nodules, given the same experience level, those with higher fluid intelligence and object recognition ability perform better. The recently proposed construct of visual object recognition ability may add unique information relative to general cognitive skills in assessing aptitude for a career in radiology.

Here we examine a new task to assess working memory for visual arrays in which the participant must judge how many items changed from a studied array to a test array. As a clue to processing, on some trials in the first two experiments, participants carried out a metamemory judgment in which they were to decide how many items were in working memory. Trial-to-trial fluctuations in these working memory storage judgments correlated with performance fluctuations within an individual, indicating a need to include trial-to-trial variation within capacity models (through either capacity fluctuation or some other attention parameter). Mathematical modeling of the results achieved a good fit to a complex pattern of results, suggesting that working memory capacity limits can apply even to judgments that involve an entire array rather than just a single item that may have changed, thus providing the expected conscious access to at least some of the contents of working memory.

The part-whole paradigm was one of the first measures of holistic processing and it has been used to address several topics in face recognition, including its development, other-race effects, and more recently, whether holistic processing is correlated with face recognition ability. However the task was not designed to measure individual differences and it has produced measurements with low reliability. We created a new holistic processing test designed to measure individual differences based on the part-whole paradigm, the Vanderbilt Part Whole Test (VPWT). Measurements in the part and whole conditions were reliable, but, surprisingly, there was no evidence for reliable individual differences in the partwhole index (how well a person can take advantage of a face part presented within a whole face context compared to the part presented without a whole face) because part and whole conditions were strongly correlated. The same result was obtained in a version of the original part-whole task that was modified to increase its reliability. Controlling for object recognition ability, we found that variance in the whole condition does not predict any additional variance in face recognition over what is already predicted by performance in the part condition.

Radiologists make many important decisions when detecting nodules on chest radiographs. While training can result in high levels of performance of this task, there could be individual differences in relevant perceptual abilities that are present pre-training. A pre-requisite to address this question is a valid and reliable measure of such abilities. The present work introduces a new measure, the Vanderbilt Chest Radiograph Test (VCRT), which aims to quantify individual differences in perceptual abilities for radiograph-related decision-making in novices. We validate the relevance of the test to diagnostic imaging by verifying radiologists’ superior performance on the test compared to novices’. The final VCRT version produces scores with acceptable internal consistency. Then, we investigate how the VCRT can be used in future research by evaluating how the test relates to extant measures of face and object recognition ability. We find that the VCRT shares a small but significant portion of its variance with a measure of novel object recognition, suggesting that some aspect of VCRT performance is driven by a domain-general visual ability.