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To the Trained Eye: Perceptual Expertise Alters Visual Processing
Author(s) -
Curby Kim M.,
Gauthier Isabel
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
topics in cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.191
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1756-8765
pISSN - 1756-8757
DOI - 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01058.x
Subject(s) - perception , cognitive psychology , psychology , visual perception , face perception , face (sociological concept) , object (grammar) , variety (cybernetics) , visual processing , domain specificity , domain (mathematical analysis) , perceptual learning , cognitive science , computer science , cognition , artificial intelligence , mathematical analysis , social science , mathematics , neuroscience , sociology
Perceptual expertise refers to learning that is specific to a domain, that transfers to new items within the trained domain, and that leads to automatic processing in the sense that expertise effects can be measured across a variety of tasks. It can be argued that most of us possess some degree of perceptual expertise in a least one, if not several domains, thereby giving the study of perceptual expertise broad application. Some object categories may in fact be objects of perceptual expertise to the majority of people: Faces appear to be one such example. Thus, the use of face stimuli, or the comparison of face and object perception, can be a powerful way to ask whether a given process is influenced by perceptual expertise. Here, we emphasize one characteristic way that face processing appears to differ from nonface processing: that is, the degree to which they recruit a “holistic” rather than a “featural” perceptual strategy. This review brings evidence that expertise influences perceptual processing together with recent findings that the capacity of visual short‐term memory is greater in perceptual experts and explores the relationship between the two.