I saw Ralph Hanna give a talk a bit ago about paleography in which he said that it was useful to have a brain that could see a letterform and match it w/a letterform seen a decade earlier in a different library on another continent.
He didn't call it pattern-matching.

and he didn't associate it with specific neurology, and that I would and he did not says a good deal on its own.

And yet I just saw a plate in an article and said:
"The author is wrong. did that artist do the book of hours I saw in 2011?" [checked, nope]
or "is it that missal at the BL?"
And it was the missal.

And I sort of wish that academics thought more about our own cognition bc by assuming we do it the same way everyone does we iron out a lot of difference and may not help ourselves teach others.
It's the wetware software behind the methodology, and we just don't talk about it.