Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Beyond Perceptual Expertise: Revisiting The Neural Substrates Of Expert Object Recognition, Assaf Harel, Dwight J. Kravitz, Chris I. Baker

Psychology Faculty Publications

Real-world expertise provides a valuable opportunity to understand how experience shapes human behavior and neural function. In the visual domain, the study of expert object recognition, such as in car enthusiasts or bird watchers, has produced a large, growing, and often-controversial literature. Here, we synthesize this literature, focusing primarily on results from functional brain imaging, and propose an interactive framework that incorporates the impact of high-level factors, such as attention and conceptual knowledge, in supporting expertise. This framework contrasts with the perceptual view of object expertise that has concentrated largely on stimulus-driven processing in visual cortex. One prominent version of …